Baselines for Approval

On Wednesday we'll release our first approval figures for Barack Obama and Bev Perdue in North Carolina. One thing we can tell you for sure is that they'll be a lot better than their predecessors' numbers were down the stretch.

The final poll we took on Mike Easley's approval, last June, showed 33% of voters approving of his job performance with 37% disapproving.

I regret that we stopped tracking President Bush's approval in the state last year, mostly because it was becoming a broken record, but in November of 2007 53% of voters viewed him negatively with only 41% having a positive opinion of his work. Those numbers were even worse in other polling I saw over the course of 2008.

We're going to be more careful about tracking Obama and Perdue's approval every month so that there's a good historical record of how it changes over time.