Gallup is generally considered the grandfather of all the polling services, although I have heard stories over the years that they skew Conservative in their questioning. Overall though, I believe they are fair and objective with the questions they ask, and their methods of reporting their results.

The trend is hardly surprising given the NIE, the general response to Bush's State of the Union address, the IPCC report on climate change, the CBO estimate showing the surge will require double the personnel and the double the cost estimated by the administration, and the continued escalation of violence in Iraq. In fact a 4% decline in Bush's popularity is statistically insignificant given the 3% margin of error.

Frankly, the use of public opinion polls themselves are in my opinion starting to pose a threat to democracy themselves. The newspapers give them more weight than general elections. Since November 2006, where the public clearly indicated strong sentiment against the war, the tendency of newspapers to focus on stories like these--job approval ratings--undercuts the results of elections. IMO, the public is getting increasingly frustrated with elections that do not yield the results that the public voted for. The poll tells me one thing, statistically, that about one third of the public failed to learn the scientific method in school, as they will support Bush no matter how high the stack of evidence is against him on the ... More »

Useful point poll. There are lots of other polls.

Another poll telling us about how bad a job he is doing at everything. I think the only pole Americans will really care about will be the one they end up hanging him from.

Free access to this report may expire on 2/6/7. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ±3 percentage points.

The article is excellent for its kind. It is hard to know what this kind of information means exactly. It is shocking to me that anyone would approve of the performance of this president who has wrought extraordinary moral and material damage on the country.