Shock Poll: AP Finds Obama Hits Sixty Percent Level of Support (Among Democrats)

The poll purports to be of all people, but, this is weird, they seem to think the country is very heavily Democratic.

Obama's numbers here are huge on everything -- why, people even approve of the handling of the economy!

And then, when you check the cross-tabs, you find out the people polled were the the American Bar Association, NAMBLA, and the members of the Grateful Dead. Including the dead one.

But then you get to the party ID: 46 percent identify as Democrat or leaning Democrat, 29 percent identify as Republican or leaning Republican, 4 percent identify as purely independent leaning towards neither party, and 20 percent answered, “I don’t know.”

For contrast, the AP’s immediate preceding poll was 45 percent Democrat, 33 percent Republican; the likely-voter pool in October 2010 was 43 percent Democrat, 48 percent Republican. The poll’s total sample in October 2010 split 43 percent Democrat, 40 percent Republican.

There's always a question on this partisan-affiliation question, because pollsters typically ask people about what they believe their affiliation is. And this changes. When the GOP is doing poorly, conservative-leaners will tend to report they're "independent;" when we do well, some of these conservative-leaning independents now identify as Republicans. Same thing with the Democrats, their less-party-attached leaners sometimes saying "Democrat" and sometimes saying "independent."

So there may be some disaffected Democrats, who were previously saying they were "independents," now proudly claiming the Democrat label, and thus the Democratic share of the public would grow.

But.

There is no way in hell that there are now more Democrats than there were when Hope and Change fever hit its climax in November 2008.

But that's what AP wishes you to believe.

Because they think you're stupid, and also, because they are.

posted by Ace at 05:15 PM

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