Comparing the most recent DailyKos/PPP poll to the three prior polls, it appears Obama’s State of the Union address may have helped shore up his support among both the right and left flanks of his coalition of supporters. Obama’s approval rating showed significant gains among voters to his left and Independent Moderates and Liberals, but no significant change among all Democrats, Republicans, or Conservatives.
The graph below shows a comparison of Obama’s approval before and after the State of the Union address among the standard demographic subgroups of the DailyKos/PPP poll. Almost all groups show a nominal increase in approval. Those that are shown in green, and labeled, showed a statistically significant increase in approval.
For this analysis, I combined the first three DailyKos/PPP polls into an aggregate dataset and weighted by age. This is essentially a three-week poll of 3000 respondents, with Obama’s approval at 46%. This is compared to the post-State of the Union poll, which has a significant increase in approval at 50%. The points in green above are shown again below with their error bars.
Some of these categories do not have many respondents, such as age 18-29, which typically has only 50-70 respondents per poll (unweighted). With few respondents, even a large change in approval is only barely significant. Also, remember the errors of polling are not taken into account in the significance calculations, so we should always throw in an extra ‘fudge factor’ and not attach too much meaning to changes that just barely meet the criterion for significance. For example, I don’t trust the change in tea party support.
The categories that I do feel confident about are men, Independents, and Liberals. So let’s look at splits by party and ideology. Here’s the nine categories:
We can see Conservatives or Republicans of any stripe were not impressed; Democrats also showed little movement. However, Democratic-leaning Independents –Moderates and Liberals – both showed significant increases in approval of Obama following the state of the Union. We have a problem with small numbers for Independent Liberals but the change is dramatic enough I think we can be confident it’s real. The change for Independent Moderates is not as solid as I’d like but we’ll move forward.
Next let’s look at where this movement among left-leaning Independents is coming from, by income:
It’s clear that almost all of the movement is from the households in the upper half of the income distribution. In fact, almost two-thirds of Obama’s overall approval increase comes from Liberal and Moderate Independents >$50K.
That’s not the only movement though:
It appears Obama consolidated support among young and Hispanic left-leaning Independents as well. Again, these categories have few respondents and are therefore more susceptible to polling errors, so we need to be cautious in interpreting the calculated significance.
If Obama was able to appeal so well to Moderates, the center of the electorate, did he do so by further alienating those to his left? To answer this question, I looked at the approval numbers among those who answered Question 3 by saying that Obama is ‘too conservative’ and who identified as Democrats or Independents. The results are shown below; approval increased from 71% to 90%.
Further increases in support on the left side of the spectrum likely took place among younger and Hispanic Liberals, and probably whites too.
I wouldn't expect these approval levels to sustain themselves. However, this bump in approval levels does speak to Obama's ability to speak to both the left and the right side of his voting coalition, despite all that has and has not happened during his presidency.