Our low Obama approvals

As many of you have noticed, we show lower approval numbers for Barack Obama both nationally and on a state by state basis than most pollsters.

I think part of this has to do with IVR- people are just more willing to say they don't like a politician to us than they are to a live interviewer because they don't feel any social pressure to be nice. That's resulted in us, Rasmussen, and Survey USA showing poorer approval numbers than most for a variety of politicians.

But I think another part of it may be who we're calling. When we conduct polls this year we are using the same sampling criteria we used for all of our surveys last year- folks who voted in one of the last two or three elections. And if you look at our state by state approval numbers for Obama, they tend to link up pretty closely with the percentage of the vote he got in those places:

State	Obama Approval	Obama 2008% of Vote	Over/Under
Delaware	63	62	+1
Illinois	61	62	-1
Minnesota	60	54	+6
Wisconsin	55	56	-1
Ohio	51	52	-1
North Carolina	50	50	Same
Colorado	49	54	-5
Arkansas	47	39	+8
Kentucky	46	41	+5
Texas	45	44	+1
Alabama	45	39	+6
West Virginia	39	43	-4
Oklahoma	38	34	+4

On average Obama's approval rating is 1.5% higher than the share of the vote he received in a given state, so pretty close to identical. And here's my big question: if you didn't vote for Obama, why would you approve of his job performance now? He was pretty clear during the campaign about what he was going to do if he got elected, and that's pretty much what he's done. If you didn't like that enough to vote for him I'm not sure why you would like it enough to approve of him now.

That's not a criticism of the President by any means, the reality is that we're just a very divided nation politically. 5% of the electorate might have changed sides between 2004 and 2008 to move us from an R+3 country to a D+7 country but we're still pretty evenly split and any President who makes tough choices or exhibits leadership is going to earn the wrath of a significant chunk of the population.

It makes sense to me that Obama's approval numbers would closely track his vote numbers. Other pollsters may be using less strict sampling criteria that results in a good number of folks being polled who didn't vote last year and I would think apathetic folks are less likely to be unhappy with the President. There's not a right or wrong way to do it but I just wanted to shed some light on one of the factors I think might be responsible for the relatively modest figures we get for Obama.