Public Policy Polling for Daily Kos & SEIU. 10/6-9 . Registered voters. MoE ±3.1% (Obama trendlines 9/2-25, all others 9/15-18):
After weeks of being mired at or near record lows, Barack Obama's job approvals abruptly—and unexpectedly—bounced six points this week, while his favorability shot up by almost twice that. While there have been plenty of newsworthy events recently (not least Occupy Wall Street), the president himself hasn't been making many headlines lately and there hasn't been much good economic news (unless you take a very optimistic view of the September jobs report, which in any event was released after this poll went into the field). So none of the usual drivers of poll numbers have been in evidence recently.
This means I can tell you what changed in our cross-tabs, but I can't tell you why things changed. In particular, Obama's job approvals with Democrats moved up 13 net points—and his standing with independents jumped even further, 21 points. If I were a very lazy Beltway journalist, I'd look at those numbers, declare that the president was recovering with those oh-so-important swing voters, invent a few reasons as to why this was happening, and call it a day.
That would, of course, be the height of sophistry. Instead, I'll just say that "blip happens." No other pollster has recorded a jump like this, so there's a good chance this poll is simply an outlier, especially given the size of the bump. And if we do start seeing an upward trend over the next few weeks and months, then maybe we can start drawing some tentative conclusions about what this all means. Until some time passes, though, I'm in my usual mode of national poll analysis: wait-and-see.