Are all President Bush's speeches blasting Iraq war critics and fearmongering in the wake of the 5th anniversary of September 11th paying off? The headline in USA Today this morning is that Bush's
approval rating has risen to 44% with 51% disapproving. This is his highest approval rating in a USA TODAY/Gallup poll since September 2005.
What does this have to do with anything you might ask? The president isn't up for reelection, and the midterms are really just a nationwide collection of individual races. Actually, as UW Madison Political Science Professor Charles Franklin has
documented, gains and losses of seats in midterm elections are strongly correlated with presidential approval ratings (understandably, since the president's party supports most of his policies. So if the president is popular, the party can ride his coattails or vice-versa if he is unpopular). Indeed, Governor Doyle reminds the public at every opportunity that Mark Green votes with the president 92% of the time. This could potentially lose its effectiveness if the president regains popularity.
Presidential approval is also inversely correlated with
gas prices, which have fallen from their August highs above $3 to under $2.50 per gallon. I find this alarming in that citizens are so uninformed on the issues that one of the strongest factors in determing how they feel the president is doing is how much they have to shell out to fill up the family's Ford Explorer. Americans have a notoriously short memory of news stories that we political junkies find outrageous (think Katrina, CIA leaks, warrantless wiretapping, Abu Ghraib, etc...).
But what can we, as Democrats, do to counter the trend? Ultimately we need a positive, simple message that resonates with voters rather than simply presenting our candidates as the least of two evils. In regards to the governor's race, it is important to get the message out about how disasterous it would be for Bush's BFF Mark Green to win the statehouse, but we can't forget to emphasize all the important things Governor Doyle has done and will do for Wisconsin once reelected. We simply cannot depend on tying Green to President Bush and Congress' unpopularity, because as you can see, those things depend largely on factors beyond our control and may not last until November.
This poll may have been an outlier, and I hope it was. But even so, our Democratic message needs to be positive and NOT dependent on the failings or perceived failings of our opponents.
