As Republicans search for new ways to cave on their attempt to take the country hostage and call it winning, Rasmussen (pollster to the Republican stars) has President Obama’s approval rating on the rise at levels not seen since last spring. Obama currently has a 51% approval rating per Thursday’s Presidential tracking poll.
Fifty-one percent of likely voters approve of President Obama’s job performance, while 47% disapprove. This should help spike the GOP over to the bargaining table with a clean debt ceiling offer (sans legislative dirty bombs, please), if the Koch defection wasn’t enough of a push.
It’s not all roses for Obama – but of course, he isn’t ever going to run for office again, whereas Republicans are. Thirty percent strongly approve of the way Obama is performing as president and 37% strongly disapprove. Rasmussen notes, “This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -7.” Or it means that among the extremists in both parties, conservative Republicans currently hate Obama (no news there) more than Democrats or liberals approve. This is a daily tracking poll, so it makes sense that conservatives are especially angry whereas liberals are worried about what Obama will concede.
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Rasmussen notes that POTUS’ approval ratings haven’t been this consistently high since last spring, “As the government shutdown continues and the debt ceiling debate escalates, the president’s job approval ratings are again on the rise to levels not seen consistently since last spring. Fifty-five percent (55%) of women approve of the job the president is doing; 52% of men disapprove.”
Nate Silver determined that Rasmussen’s polls were off by 5.9 points and had a 3.9 point bias in favor of the Republican candidates in 2010:
Polls branded as Rasmussen Reports missed by an average of 5.9 points and had a 3.9 point bias. The polls it commissioned on behalf of Fox News had a 5.1 point error, and a 3.6 point bias.
Rasmussen showed Barack Obama’s disapproval rating at 36 percent, for instance, just a week after his inauguration, at a point when no other pollster had that figure higher than 20 percent.
And then again in 2012:
Several polling firms got notably poor results, on the other hand. For the second consecutive election — the same was true in 2010 — Rasmussen Reports polls had a statistical bias toward Republicans, overestimating Mr. Romney’s performance by about four percentage points, on average.
I’m not suggesting that the numbers for Obama’s approval are probably higher than Rasmussen is showing based on their historic bias problems, but rather assuming that they’ve gone out of their way to correct these issues, we still have a Republican leaning pollster putting Obama at 51% approval in the middle of the shutdown and debt ceiling wars that Republicans started in an effort to be seen as destroying this President.
A Rasmussen poll is like a Fox News poll to Republicans. Sometimes it actually is a Fox News poll.
Allow me to translate for Republicans: You’re losing. There’s no way out other than to stop being economic terrorists.
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