Quick Hit

Survey USA, a national polling outfit, has been tracking daily changes to President Bush's approval/disapproval rating for the federal government's Hurricane Katrina response. [link] The survey, which has been tracking since August 31, seems to show that the President got no bounce from his speech to the nation last Thursday.

Daily Kos gets the hat tip for pointing me to this [link], but I poked around on the Survey USA interactive poll results, and found some interesting points that Kos didn't cover. For example, it's not news that black respondents have generally given the President very low marks (18% approval among blacks vs. 40% among all groups; 77% disapproval for blacks vs. 56% among all groups). But what explains the results for Hispanic respondents? Starting at 53% on August 31, the President's approval rating among Hispanics pretty steadily declined to 28% by the end of Labor Day weekend, then rebounded to 37% before eroding to 20% by September 11. The next day they spiked to 31%, then plummetted down to 19% the following day. By last Thursday, the numbers spiked again to 50% (31 points in two days!) but have since dropped down to 33%. Not being a statistician, I don't have a good explanation, but found it interesting anyway.

Other factoids -- women give the President lower approval ratings than men; the approval ratings go up the older the respondent is; and the Northeast Region overall approves of the President's performance less than other parts of the country. None of these, by the way, seems particularly surprising to me -- especially the one about the Northeast being out of step (by at least 9-10%) with the rest of the country.