Gallup: Obama approval 50 percent, disapproval 43 percent

[aaaaaa5a]

11. Guys, try not to get to excited about this number.

The daily tracking polls have become absurd.


Both Gallup and (R)asmussen go up and down for no reason. I think we have reached the point with these daily tracking polls of public saturation. This is why the results are so random and at odds with traditional polling. Next week Obama could be at 43%. And it will be just as difficult to find a big newsworthy event to justify the real low rating as it is to justify this one.


Obama is the first President to have a daily tracking poll run by Gallup. This is why sometimes it is wrong to even compare Obama's Gallup approval numbers to Gallup's approval numbers of past Presidents. The poll setups are not the same.


Gallup has even done traditional polls that have led to different approval ratings from their tracking polls, even when both polls were done at the same time.


Remember this post, when Obama falls back down to 43% for no apparent reason.


A few days ago the (R)asmussen tracking poll had Romney up 3 or 4% points over the President. This completely contradicts every other poll on the planet with regard to the Obama/Romney race. Today the tracking poll says the race is even. So what happened?


I have come to believe that the only thing these tracking polls are good for is recognizing trend lines.

But even here the daily tracking polls are losing value.

This is because the Gallup numbers are so up and down, that any trend big enough to break though the inconsistency is likely to be obvious to anybody. (Example: Everyone gets a bump during convention week. We don't need a daily tracking poll to tell us that.)