New poll - bad news for GOP

[YayArea]

Favorability Index
(2VP + SP - SN - 2VN)

DEM
Hillary Clinton: +52
Barack Obama: +20
John Kerry: +5
Democratic Party: +4
Joe Biden: +3
Harry Reid: -26
Nancy Pelosi: -30

GOP
Mitch McConnell: -22 (but a-lot of "never heard of&quot
John Boehner: -35
Republican Party: -44
Tea Party: -47

LINK
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/_Today_Stories_Teases/13018_JANUARY_NBC-WSJ.pdf

[defacto7]

1. I'll accept that!

[Kalidurga]

2. Uh oh the skewed numbers guy is going to be very busy

He might bust a circuit trying to unskew those numbers.

[lindysalsagal]

3. Wow! The House is all the way up to 15 approval rating.

I believe that's a 6 point rally!

WooHooo! You go, House!

[flamingdem]

4. Wow, Hillary to the moon

Maybe McConnell should engineer an mini accident to get some sympathy

[In_The_Wind]

5. I like this poll's results.

[img][/img]

[FleetwoodMac]

6. Good God, you nearly gave me a heart attack...

with that 48 points favorability gap between the Democrats and the GOP!!!
lol. I wished it was so, but it is actually 18 points for the GOP - a 29 points absolute gap. Still significant, of course.

[Jim Lane]

9. The difference is that the OP was double-weighting the "strongly positive" and "strongly negative"

The table you present doesn't make any distinction; it lumps together all the positives, whatever the intensity, and all the negatives.

If accounting for intensity takes the Dems from +29 to +40, that tells us that there is greater strength of feeling among those who are pro-Democratic and/or anti-Republican than there is among those on the opposite side. That's an interesting result. I would have guessed that the fanatical Tea Party types would have contributed enough "strongly" responses so that such a weighting would make the Republicans look better, not worse.

[FleetwoodMac]

10. Huh? The OP probably just misquoted the numbers from the original article

The table I presented totaled up the "Very Positive" and "Somewhat Positive," and it was meant to provide a clearer picture.
You could view the breakdown, as well as the referred table, from the survey result linked in the OP. Though I still don't see how you reached +40.

[Jim Lane]

12. No, the OP was just using a different part of the original article

You're correct that you used the table (from page 12) that summarized Question 8 by lumping together the "Very Positive" and the "Somewhat Positive".

The OP clearly stated that it was reporting a different number:

"Favorability Index
(2VP + SP - SN - 2VN)"

In other words, the OP used numbers (derived from the detailed data of that same Question 8, on pages 6 through 11) that gave greater weight to more intense feelings.

As for +40, that was an error on my part, thanks for the catch. I meant to quote FleetwoodMac in #6, who stated the difference between the parties (using the OP's "Favorability Index&quot as +48, because the OP had Democrats at +4 and Republicans at -44.

BUT on further review it seems to me that the OP made a mistake in that calculation. The numbers (VP, SP, SN, VN) for each party are:
Democrats: 17 27 19 19 (from page 7)
Republicans: 6 20 24 25 (from page 8)

By my calculations, the Democrats are indeed at +4, but the Republicans are at -42, not -44, so the gap is 46 points, not 48.

So I was incorrectly quoting FleetwoodMac, who correctly used the OP's numbers in calculating the +48 but who was therefore using one number (the -44) that the OP had calculated incorrectly in deriving it from the source. Ya got that?

To me, the surprising thing is that the Republicans had only 6% giving them "Very Positive" ratings. I would've thought that there were more Tea Partiers who would ardently praise the Republicans for obstructing Obama. Maybe some of them went with only "Somewhat Positive" because they don't think the Republicans have been obstructive enough.

[LukeFL]

7. Good numbers but do we do with them?

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. kick

[Dawson Leery]

11. LOL!

The Koch brothers plan to get a bunch of reactionary kooks in the streets (teaklan) isn't working out so well.

[bigdarryl]

13. These polls mean nothing because they were taken as a National poll of the rethugs

If you go district to district these guys UNFORTUNATELY!!! are very popular and 99.9% of the people in those districts are republicans .That's what gerrymandering the system gets you and by the way this is there plan also to gerrymander the Presidential elections also

[Presidentcokedupfratboy]

14. No surprise here

The GOP is about as popular as Art Modell in Cleveland.