Poll Dance
Stop comparing Sarah Palin's approval ratings with Barack Obama's.
http://www.slate.com/id/2236604/According to the latest poll numbers, Sarah Palin is nearly as popular as Barack Obama. Or maybe it's that Barack Obama is nearly as unpopular as Sarah Palin. At least that's how some commentators see it: As the Los Angeles Times' Andrew Malcolm noted Monday, "Sarah Palin's poll numbers are strengthening. And President Obama's are sliding." In Tuesday's Washington Post, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd wrote that "Palin's favorability numbers are a mirror image of those of Obama."
The problem is, they're comparing apples to oranges. Both columns refer to polls that show Palin's favorability rating at around 43 percent—mere points away from Obama's job-approval rating of 49 percent. But as Media Matters has pointed out, favorability and job approval aren't the same thing. A politician's favorability rating is a general sense of the public's feeling about him. His job-approval rating is an evaluation of the work he's doing.
When you compare favorability ratings—apples to apples—Obama still leads Palin by a distance. The latest Gallup poll puts Obama's favorability 16 points ahead of Palin's, ABC puts his lead at 18 points, and CNN says it's 18 points higher. (Only Fox has the gap in single digits, with a seven-point spread.) It's impossible to compare their job-approval numbers because, well, Palin doesn't have a job.
You'd think the two measurements would be roughly the same—but they're not. In general, politicians tend to have better favorability ratings than job-approval ratings. That has been the case with Obama since January, as it was with George W. Bush, who maintained high favorability (some might call it likeability) even when the public disapproved of what he was doing in office. There are exceptions: During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton had a lower favorability than job-approval rating. Many people who despised him personally liked where he was steering the country.
Still, the two numbers get conflated all the time. The problem is the fuzzy ways pollsters word their questions. "Pollsters love vague questions because they're easy to make comparable," says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com. The more specific the questions' wording, the bigger the disparity. For example, a recent Quinnipiac poll explicitly distinguished between liking Obama "as a person" and liking "his policies." A full 74 percent of respondents said they liked him as a person. But of that group, a third said they didn't like his policies. The gap owes partly to the realities of governing: If you ask people how Obama is doing at his job, they're more likely to think of the 10 percent unemployment rate than if you ask about Obama in general. So when it comes to approval ratings, someone who doesn't hold office often has a built-in advantage over someone who does.
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