So what kind of "bump" are we to expect? Well, for one, we may see some snap polls that mean absolutely nothing. So irrelevant, in fact, that ABC News has
stopped doing them.
- "Partisans watch these things; rather than torturing themselves, people who don't like the guy can just turn to another of their 100 channels. When we polled on the SOTU in 2003, we found that the president's approval rating among speech watchers was 70 percent, versus 47 percent among those who didn't watch. As we put it at the time: 'Simply put, people who don't like a particular president are considerably less apt to tune him in.'"
- "These speeches tend to be composed of poll-tested applause lines, so the people who watch are already predisposed to like what they hear."
"We haven't done immediate post-SOTU reax polls in years (pre-war 2003 was an exception) because, given 1 and 2 above, they are so dreadfully predictable."
Meanwhile, Mystery Pollster has a great post on the history of SOTU bounces, or, more accurately, the lack of them.
He notes the WH "lower-the-expectation" spin:
In looking at poll movement before and after State of the Union addresses, the average over the last fifty years is actually a slight drop (-0.2%). President Bush's average change is also a drop (-0.4%). Only one of his SOTU addresses showed positive movement (2005), which is likely attributed to the intervening events of the 2005 Inaugural and January 2005 Iraqi elections.
Then he notes the DNC's counterspin:
[Dowd's] assertions are hardly credible given the press accounts following the last four Bush State of the Union addresses...
President "Always" Gets A Bump From State Of The Union. During an appearance on CNN, Rick Dunham, White House correspondent for Business Week Magazine, noted that, "And if you look at the CNN- Gallup polls, (the) president always gets a big bump out of State of the Union. There hasn't been a bad State of the Union speech, according to instant reaction, for -- I mean, for all these years." (CNN, Reliable Sources, 2/3/02)
So who's right? As Mark Blumenthal methodically shows, they both are. There is always an immediate post-debate favorable reaction (see the ABC News quote above), but it's seldom lasting.
