Nate Silver: It's still the economy. dumbass!

[BurtWorm]

From FiveThirtyEight.com:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/its-still-economy-dumbass.html

All right -- this is my favorite graph in quite some time. Let's show the picture first and ask questions later.



What we have is a comparison of Barack Obama's approval ratings on the economy to his approval ratings overall. It includes all polls in the Pollster.com database that asked about both approval of Obama on the economy and his overall job performance -- a total of 109 polls dating back to the start of his term. I've then drawn in some LOESS curves to illustrate the trend.

The two lines track each other uncannily well. From the very start of Obama's term, there's been about a 5-6 point gap between approval of his performance on the economy and his performance overall, with the latter figure consistently being somewhat higher. Although Obama's approval has declined in both departments (particularly during period between about April 1 and August 1; it may not be declining any further now), the magnitude of the gap has been exceptionally steady over time.

The economy, I suppose, is sort of boring to talk about: it's a slow-moving sort of thing, and one over which the President has only a certain modicum of control. And so you'll have pundits attributing Obama's slide to all various and sundry sorts of things -- Health Care! Henry Louis Gates! Torture Trials! -- when really it's just been very much about the number of people who have come to blame Obama about the economy has tended to accelerate faster than perceptions of the economy itself.

Let's now add a third variable, which is Obama's approval on health care. We'll look only at those polls that asked about health care in addition to the economy and job performance, in order to create a truly apples-to-apples comparison:




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