Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos and SEIU (5/19-22, MoE: ±3.1, registered voters, Obama trendlines 5/12-15, all others 5/5-8):
Not unexpectedly, Barack Obama's numbers have begun to move downward after they spiked upward right after Osama bin Laden's death. You can see this in graphical form using our
new visualization tool from Tableau Software (the darker-colored lines represent positive numbers):
Obama favorables
Obama job approval
What's interesting to me here is the spread between Obama's favorability numbers — which is more of a question about what you think of the guy personally — and his job approval numbers, which are designed to gauge how voters view Obama's actual performance as president. In these very partisan times, there hasn't been a lot of difference in these two measures for Obama, though generally speaking, his favorables have been slightly higher than approvals, which is normal. (There are usually some people out there who say the like the politician but not his policies. The reverse is rarer.)
Yet right after the bin Laden announcement, Obama's approvals spiked a net 12 points, while his favorables moved up 9 points. Not a dramatic difference, but notable only because, as I say, the president tends to do better in the latter category rather than the former. Now things seem to be returning to normal, though, with approvals moving downward one net point faster than favorables. What remains to be seen is where these numbers will plateau. Will the president stay in slightly positive territory? Or will he trend back down toward his previous slightly negative numbers? We won't be polling this weekend on account of the Memorial Day holiday, but we'll be back the following week, so stay tuned.
One final thought: Many, many pollsters test the president's ratings and of course their results don't always agree with one another. One other trustworthy firm has been in the field multiple times since bin Laden's death, and has also been in as recently as we have. That's Gallup, and they currently have Obama at a 50-42 job approval rating. However, that's down four net points from his post-bin Laden peak of 52-40, very similar to the five-point drop we showed (51-43 to 49-46).