That’s about the limit of support for Bush’s basic approach to Social Security “reform”. A new Gallup analysis shows that, outside of paid-up members of the Republican base, almost no subgroups of the electorate support Bush’s approach and most are outright hostile.
Here’s the question that Gallup bases its analysis on:

As you may know, one idea to address concerns with the Social Security system would allow people who retire in future decades to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market and bonds, but would reduce the guaranteed benefits they get when they retire. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea?

A pretty fair summation, I think, of Bush’s approach. And here’s Gallup on what people say when asked this:

About 4 in 10 Americans have consistently said that such a proposal is a “good idea,” while slightly fewer than 6 in 10 have said it is a “bad idea.” An analysis of support for the reform proposal by subgroup — based on an aggregate of the three polls in which the question was asked — reveals that few subgroups endorse it. Republicans and conservatives are most likely to express support, and younger Americans are more likely than older Americans to favor this reform approach. The data suggest the president would have a lot of work to do to convince others to support such a proposal.

Indeed. The data adduced in the rest of the analysis include the following levels of opposition to Bush’s approach: 61-34 among independents; 65-31 among moderates; 55-41 among those 30-49 years old; 63-33 among those 55-64; and 64-31 among those 65 or older.
In addition, just 40 percent of whites support Bush’s proposal and every income group opposes it save those with $100,000 or more in income. And even these affluent respondents only support it by a narrow 51-47.
As the Gallup analysis concludes: “At this stage, it looks as if there is little initial support for the proposal outside of Bush’s most reliable supporters.” That’s the simple truth of the matter, no matter what the administration shills keep on saying.

On the most straightforward level, of course, what happened in the south (defined as the 11 states of the Old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) was that it provided Bush with rock-solid support, as he carried all 13 southern states, including the most contested state, Florida. That was central to his election victory.
Digging deeper into the data, though, a number of interesting patterns emerge that go far beyond that undeniable fact.
1. While the south did move in Bush’s direction in the ’04 election, it moved about the same, in terms of percentage points, as the rest of the country.
2. In the 2000 election, however, the south did move more in Bush’s direction (12 points) than the rest of the country (7 points). In 1996, Clinton actually split the southern vote with Dole, 46-46.
3. In the 2004 election, despite the fact that Bush did not disproportionately increase his percentage point margin in the south, 58 percent of his gains in vote margin came from the south, reflecting disproportionately high turnout increases in a number of those states.
4. Bush’s biggest gains in percentage point margin in the south in 2004 were in micropolitan and rural areas, not metro areas. And, since 1996, the Republican presidential margin in the south has increased by 29 points in rural areas, by 26 points in micropolitan areas and by only 12 points in metro areas.
5. Since 1980, the south’s share of the national popular vote has increased by 5 points. That has been entirely within southern metro areas; the vote share of southern micropolitan and rural areas remains unchanged.
Since it appears that these rapidly growing metro areas in the south have been significantly less susceptible to Bush’s appeal than the micropolitan and rural areas of the south, it is undoubtedly these metro areas that hold the key to a southern comeback for the Democrats.

That pesky public. The more it hears about Bush’s proposal on Social Security, the less it seems to like it and the more it seems to reject the whole “ownership society” concept that Bush has attempted to tie into the proposal.
Consider these findings from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
1. After all of Bush’s crisis-mongering, only 17 percent of the public is willing to term Social Security’s financial situation a crisis.
2. After all of Bush’s stumping for his proposal in the last two months and all the coverage in the press, the percentage believing we should make some adjustments, but leave the “Social Security system basically as is” has risen from 39 to 50 percent, while the percent saying we should change the Social Security system “to allow people to invest some of their Social Security taxes in private accounts” has declined from 45 to 40 percent.
Similarly, over the last two months, Bush has not been able to push the number over 40 percent who think it is “a good idea….to change the Social Security system to allow workers to invest their Social Security contributions in the stock market?”, while the number thinking it’s a bad idea has remained steady at 50-51 percent.
Not only that, of those who think this change is a bad idea, 60 percent say their position is “completely firm and unlikely to change”. That’s just the reverse of the situation with those who think the change is a good idea, where 68 percent say they’re “open to changing their mind”.
3. How committed are people to the idea of private accounts? Four times as many give primary importance to keeping the system from running short of money (49 percent) than give that level of importance to creating investment accounts (12 percent).
4. How interested are people in the ownership society approach? By 61-32, the public says Congress should place the most emphasis on “providing guarantees for the future” in Social Security and health care, rather than “giving people more responsibility and personal control”.
5. How to save money in the Social Security system? Only two proposals tested by NBC/WSJ garnered majority support: limiting the benefits that are paid out to wealthy retirees (64 percent) and, intriguingly, gradually increasing the Social Security payroll tax (51 percent).
Guess those RNC talking points aren’t quite doing the job!

Most of the counties in the US lie outside of metropolitan areas (roughly two-thirds). These nonmetro counties are typically thought of as rural by most people. But all rural areas are not the same–many have an urban core, albeit a small one, which dominates a central county and to which people in surrounding counties may commute. These areas have recently been designated “micropolitan areas” by OMB to differentiate them from other nonmetro areas. Here’s the Economic Research Service on the basic definition of micropolitan areas:

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was urged by various sources in the last decade to delineate the entire land surface of the country into areas, and not leave the territory outside of metro areas as an undifferentiated residual. As a partial response, OMB designated micro areas using the same procedure as that for metro areas. Any nonmetro county with an urban cluster of at least 10,000 persons or more becomes the central county of a micro area. As with metro areas, outlying counties are included if commuting to the central county is 25 percent or higher, or if 25 percent of the employment in the outlying county is made up of commuters from the central county. Because they are county-based and include outlying areas, the total area population reaches well beyond 50,000 for many micro areas. The inaugural set of 560 micro areas includes 674 counties and ranges in size from 13,000 (Andrews, Texas) to 182,000 (Torrington, Connecticut).
Micro areas contain just under 60 percent of the nonmetro population, with an average of 43,000 people per county. In contrast, the 1,378 “noncore” counties, with no urban cluster of 10,000 or more residents, average just 14,000 people.

It is these micropolitan areas that include the bulk of the rural population, as mentioned above, even though they are only about a third of rural counties and include only about a quarter of rural land area. They tend to be more economically dynamic and, of course, are far denser than other rural counties, with about a third of micropolitan residents actually living in the principal cities of these areas (the corresponding figure for metro areas is not so much higher, about 40 percent).
Much more fascinating detail on micropolitan areas, as well as the entire new system of metro classification promulgated by OMB, may be found in this excellent report from the Brookings Institution, “Tracking Metropolitan America into the 21st Century: A Field Guide to the New Metropolitan and Micropolitan Areas“.
Are their political implications to this? Sure. If Democrats want to improve their performance in rural areas, that must principally be about improving their performance in micropolitan areas. Three-fifths of the rural vote and three-fifths of Bush’s gains in rural areas in 2004 were in micropolitan areas. And micropolitan areas, by virtue of their relatively high density and significant urban populations, should be more cosmopolitan and more open to Democratic appeals than the thinly-populated, non-micropolitan areas that make up the rest of rural America.

By Alan Abramowitz
According to the 2004 American National Election Study (NES), both major parties contacted record numbers of voters prior to the 2004 election. However, according to the NES data, the percentage of voters contacted by the Democratic Party increased much more dramatically than the percentage contacted by the Republican Party. 31 percent of respondents in the post-election phase of the survey reported being contacted by the Democratic Party, shattering the previous record of 22 percent set in 2000. 28 percent of respondents reported being contacted by the Republican Party, also breaking the record of 25 percent set in 2000. In addition, 18 percent of voters reported being contacted before the election by a non-party group or organization.
And these mobilization efforts appear to have had an effect, especially among less educated and lower income voters. The difference in reported turnout between those who were contacted and those who were not contacted was 32 points among the high school educated, 21 points among those with some college education, and only 8 points among college graduates. Similarly, there was a difference in turnout of 32 points among respondents with family incomes below $25,000, 30 points among those with family incomes between $25,000 and $49,999, 14 points among those with family incomes between $50,000 and $89,999, and only 5 points among those with family incomes of $90,000 or more. Among voters who were contacted, the gap in turnout between the lowest and highest income groups was only 8 percentage points. Among those who were not contacted, the gap in turnout between the lowest and highest income groups was 26 percentage points.
These data show that despite the outcome of the election, Democrats outmobilized Republicans in 2004. In addition, the 2004 results indicate that Democratic mobilization efforts matter more than Republican mobilization efforts because mobilization has a greater impact on lower SES voters than on higher SES voters. We need to make sure that these efforts continue in 2006 and 2008.

Yesterday, I wrote about Bush’s plumetting approval rating (from 57 percent to 49 percent) in the Gallup poll and speculated that this new, more reasonable Bush approval rating was probably accompanied by the abrupt disappearance of the wacky +9 Republican party ID in their earlier poll.
As Fidel might put it, history has absolved me. Steve Soto is on the case and has extracted the party ID distribution of the latest poll sample from Gallup. It is +1 Democratic. So, from February 4-6 to February 7-10, Gallup is telling us there was a 10 point swing in party ID, from +9 Republican to +1 Democratic.
That strikes me–and most others outside of Gallup HQ, I suspect–as pretty damn implausible.

On February 6, Nick Confessore argued in the New York Times that “Going for Broke May Break Bush” and the next day Ron Brownstein commented that “Bush’s Social Security Equation Comes Up Short on Money, Trust“. And in last Friday’s New York Times, the bloody implications of indexing Social Security benefits to prices, instead of wages, were copiously detailed.
Things just aren’t coming up roses for the president as he continues to stump for his Social Security plan. It looks like it’s going to be harder than Bush anticipated to move public opinion in his direction. And that’s for a very good reason: the underlying structure of public opinion is hostile to Bush’s approach.
Consider these results from a just-released Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard survey of public opinion on Social Security issues:
1. Only about a quarter (27 percent) say Social Security is in a crisis, 46 percent say Social Security has major problems, but is not in a crisis, and the rest say the program has minor problems or no problems. Note that the “crisis” figure in this question is actually substantially lower than it was in the late 1990’s when it reached as high as 36 percent.
2. The only ways of fixing Social Security’s future financial problems that garner majority support are two alternate wording about benefit cuts for the wealthy: “reducing the rate of growth in benefits for wealthy retirees only” (60 percent) and “cutting guaranteed benefits for wealthy retirees only” (54 percent). But that’s not what Bush proposes to do–he proposes to cut everybody’s benefits, which gets quite a different reception: “reducing the rate of growth in benefits for future retirees” gets only 30 percent support and “cutting guaranteed benefits for future retirees” receives just 13 percent support.
3. No matter whether the accounts in the president’s plan are referred to as “private” or “personal”, they get about the same middling level of support in the abstract (that is, without any tradeoffs or costs). But that 54-57 percent majority support drops to a dead-even 46-46 split once Bush’s name is associated with the plan and drops much further when some of the plan’s tradeoffs and costs are mentioned.
This can be seen in two ways. First, followups to the general question of support for private/personal accounts show sharp drops in support for these accounts when costs/tradeoffs are mentioned. Specifically, support drops to 34 percent when it is pointed out that those who open accounts but make poor investment decisions would wind up with lower benefits than under the current system; to 29 percent if it is true that the plan including private/personal accounts would not by itself solve Social Security’s financial problems; and to 22 percent if the government would have to borrow $700 billion or more to set up these accounts.
Second, a question that mentions both the stock market option for Social Security contributions and changes in guaranteed benefits yields majority opposition to such an approach. People are opposed 52-43 if the change in guaranteed benefits is referred to as “reducing the rate of growth in benefits” and are opposed by an overwhelming 66-30 if the change in benefits is simply referred to as “cutting guaranteed benefits”.
4. Finally, just 9 percent believe creating private/personal accounts would, by itself, solve Social Security’s financial problems. And slightly more people believe young people will wind up with less money under a personal accounts system (35 percent) than believe they will wind up with more money if these accounts were available (33 percent). Another 24 percent believe young people will do about the same under a personal accounts system as under the current system. That means there’s a 59-35 majority against the idea young people will gain with a personal accounts system.
As a certain ex-president might have put it: that dog just won’t hunt. We’ll see how long it will take for Bush to face this bitter truth.

In my February 10 post, I noted that Gallup’s 57 percent approval rating for Bush in their February 4-6 poll was way out-of-line with other recent polls and was likely driven by the lopsided Republican party ID advantage (+9) in their sample, rather than any real world shift in public sentiment.
Now Gallup has a new poll, conducted February 7-10, and lo and behold, Bush’s 57 percent approval rating has nosedived to 49 percent, in the same neighborhood as other recent polls. It’s just a wild guess, but I shouldn’t be surprised if this lower rating for Bush was also accompanied by the disappearance of that big Republican party ID advantage (paging Steve Soto!).
You’d think that their first poll’s heavily Republican sample and outlier status relative to other polls would make the Gallup folks cautious in interpreting Bush’s approval rating drop in their second poll as representing a real political trend. Think again! Gallup, in fact, contructs a whole political story to fit their data, starting with their title “From Public’s Perspective, Past Week Not Good One for Bush: Approval ratings drop” and continuing thusly:

The new poll, conducted Feb. 7-10, shows his approval rating is back down to 49% as the news focus has shifted to his proposed federal budget and his plans for changing the Social Security system.

Could be. But an alternative, more parsimonious hypothesis is this: Bush never had a popularity spike to begin with; little changed over the period covered by Gallup’s two polls and Gallup’s swing against Bush in their latest poll is an artifact of their changing sample composition, not the product of a real shift in public opinion.
But that wouldn’t fit with the Gallup philosophy: reality’s job is to explain Gallup’s data, not the other way around.

The post below points out that the new Ipsos-AP poll has Bush’s approval rating at just 45 percent, in rather stark contrast to Gallup’s 57 percent rating, which was accompanied by a 9 point Republican party ID advantage.
But it’s interesting to note that the Ipsos poll also has a lop-sided party ID advantage–but this time for the Democrats (+12). The fact that the Ipsos party ID figure is for RVs and the Gallup figure for all adults hardly seems adequate to account for this vast difference.
In truth, neither figure seems terribly credible and, therefore, both approval figures are probably outliers driven by the party ID composition of their samples. Certainly neither figure should be taken particularly seriously on its own, though you could average the two if you wish. In that case, you get a 51 percent approval rating for Bush, pretty much in line with other figures from recent polls.
What is to be done about these wacky partisan samples, which give such misleading pictures of current politics? Perhaps it’s time to revive “dynamic party ID weighting“, an idea whose time may finally have come. Aruguably, this is the time to pursue such an innovation, away from all the passions induced by a political campaign. And, if pollsters did so, I think it would help smooth out poll results and avoid the fake surges this way and that that are starting to erode faith in the veracity of polling.
Of course, down at Gallup and many other polling headquarters as well, the view is probably that all is fine. I can assure them that all is not fine and it is time to trade in their stone-walling for a bit of listening and openness to change.

As noted yesterday, Gallup’s latest approval rating for Bush (57 percent) seems, well, a little on the high side and, teamed as it is with a lopsidedly Republican sample (a 9 point Republican advantage in party ID), seems distinctly lacking in credibility.
It’s noteworthy that no other recent poll seems to be able to come close to Gallup’s 57 percent rating. ABC News/Washington Post, for example, had Bush’s approval rating at 50 percent on January 26-31–but then, that was mostly before the Iraqi elections so perhaps the Post poll couldn’t capture that big post-Iraqi election surge toward Bush (Gallup’s own explanation for Bush’s high rating in their poll).
Newsweek, however, polled on February 3-4–after the Iraqi elections–and found only a 50 percent rating for Bush. But the Gallup poll was February 4-6 so perhaps this surge was late developing?
But, inconveniently for Gallup, Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University were in the field February 3-6 and they also found just a 50 percent approval rating for Bush.
And here’s the coup de grace: the new Fox News poll, not generally known for being unfriendly to the president and low-balling his approval rating, found his approval rating, on February 8-9, to be only 51 percent. Moreover, Fox’s 51 percent rating is actually a point below their mid-January rating for Bush, while Gallup’s recent 57 percent rating is six points above their mid-January rating for the president.
Well, something’s happened here. But I don’t believe it’s among the general public. I think it’s more in Gallup’s polling and–as indicated at the top of this post–we have some obvious suspects.