By Alan Abramowitz According to the new Gallup Poll, in the past 10 days, George Bush’s approval rating rose from 40 percent to 45 percent while his disapproval rating fell from 58 percent to 50 percent. That’s a shift from a net approval rating of -18 percent to a net approval rating of -5 percent, a pretty big change. Gallup attributes Bush’s improved poll numbers to favorable public reaction to his response to Hurricane Rita. Perhaps.
But a simpler explanation might be that the new Gallup sample is more Republican and less Democratic than the previous one. Between the Sept. 16-18 Gallup Poll and the Sept. 26-28 Gallup Poll, the proportion of Republican identifiers (including leaners) increased from 38 percent to 43 percent while the proportion of Democratic identifiers decreased from 53 percent to 47 percent. So in just 10 days a net Democratic advantage of 15 points shrank to a net Democratic advantage of just 4 points.
Given the strong relationship between party identification and presidential approval, it is likely that the entire difference between President Bush’s approval rating in these two polls was due to the difference in the partisan composition of the two samples.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
