as we now have a new leadership poll up, i wanted to check on the past results and see if there were any discernable trends. originally a comment, too lazy to clean it up.
while it's true that Harry Reid hasn't been the most popular leadership guy, it's also true that he's never been more disliked than liked. over the past 6 leadership polls, he's never been above 35% unfavorable, and his nadir had him with a 23% undecided rating.
taking a strong stand against a violently unpopular administration on the key issue of Iraq certainly helped him vault into the hearts of the netroots faithful, though.
leadership poll results (F/U/DK)
April 07: 89/5/6
February 07: 40/35/23
November 06 (no undecideds): 80/19
July 06: 70/24/4
May 06: 65/26/8
March 06: 50/33/16
compare that to Speaker Pelosi, who before the November elections actually was reviled by the poll voters. in the first poll, she was at 19/67 favorable/unfavorable. the best explaination for that might be that she really couldn't do much to halt republican legislation in the house, due to the size of the republican majority and the fact that the house is a majority rule chamber as opposed to the more minority-friendly senate. add to that difficult situation the demand for results, and it's one reason reason why she's now even more popular than Dean in the leadership poll pool. note that she was already making steady strides before the november poll, though. i would have loved to see the september numbers.
leadership poll results (F/U/DK)
April 07: 93/4/3
February 07: 82/10/7
November 06 (no undecideds): 85/14
July 06: 36/52/10
May 06: 30/56/12
March 06: 19/67/13
and then there's Howard Dean, who's never dipped under 85% approval. part of that is because of who he is, part of it is that he's a much more dynamic presence than Terry McAullife, and part of his continued love is because we took back both the house and senate dispite a lack of fund dispersal to the DSCC and DCCC. i'd wager his star would have taken some tarnish if we'd failed to win in the manner that we did last fall.
leadership poll results (F/U/DK)
April 2007: 91/3/5
February 2007: 87/7/4
November 2006 (no undecideds): 96/3
July 2006: 90/7/1
May 2006: 87/9/3
March 2006: 83/10/5
of course, this is all taken from unscientific websamples, but i think the one thing you can take away from the polls is that winning makes a lot of things better, and that winning and then doing something with it adds icing to the cake.
