Lies, Damn Lies, and Polls

When Reagan was president, the published polls didn't even have a choice for those of us with very negative ratings of him. Same thing for a poll a few months after he left office. So I finally wrote Gallup and complained. Of course, they defended the validity of their polls. But a few months after that they came out with a poll on Reagan and Carter, with a full range of choices. Reagan and Carter got about the same number of favorable ratings. But while few people disliked Carter very much, many people disliked Reagan a whole lot. But we weren't allowed to know that while Reagan was president.

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2011/07/judis-wrong-on-reagan-bush-popularity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BrendanNyhan+%28Brendan+Nyhan%29

Judis wrong on Reagan, Bush popularity

July 30, 2011

John Judis writes in The New Republic that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush "enjoyed great popularity even though polls showed that the public disliked some of their initiatives" because they provided "leadership and not mediation"

[...]

In reality, Bush's popularity shot up to stratospheric levels immediately after the 9/11 attacks (86% in a September 13 ABC News poll) before he'd even had time to show much leadership. It was a classic rally-around-the-flag response -- exactly what you'd expect given the magnitude of the attacks. The rest of his presidency was a slow decline toward the highest disapproval ratings ever recorded by an American president.

While Reagan also enjoyed high levels of approval at times (most notably, when he was shot, when the economy was booming before Iran-Contra, and when he was about to leave office), he was actually not especially popular either -- his average Gallup approval ratings in office were lower than those of Kennedy, Clinton, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and George H.W. Bush.

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