Remember that big drop in approval numbers Barack Obama suffered over the weekend? You’re remembering a phantom.
The poll that got all the chatter going about Obama’s alleged drop was published on Monday by the New York Times. It found Obama’s approval rating at 41 percent, in polling taken from March 7-11.
But we now have two new polls, one from Pew and the other from Reuters, that have Obama at 50 percent. So what’s going on?
Here, via Pollster, is the wrap up of all the polling taken roughly during the same time period as the Times poll:
CBS/NYT — March 7-11 — 41%
Bloomberg — March 8-11 — 48%
Ipsos/Reuters — March 8-11 — 50%
ABC/WaPo — March 7-10 — 46%
Pew — March 7-11 — 50%
Gallup — March 10-12 — 47%
Rasmussen — March 11-13 — 47%
The Times poll is an outlier. The overall Pollster trend is now at around 47 percent — put all the polling together and the trend is either slightly up or slightly down over the last month, depending on how one reads the data. (The key variable is whether you want your trend line to overreact or underreact to each poll — whether you place more or less emphasis on the most recent polls — something you can change by adjusting Pollster's "smoothing" function.)
Either way, there's no getting around the fact that the big Obama polling drop last week never happened. Never happened.
