Polling Data

Powerline comments on a new Washington Post/ABC poll showing the President in pretty good shape. Hindrocket notes that conservatives are not happy with the President's spending, Medicare, and immigration policies, and that seems to be bleeding over into a certian vague discontent with the President as a whole, without gaining him the center. A couple of points:

Bad News: The President's re-elect number is only 48%. 50% is usually the magic number, which indicates that this thing may yet be close.

Good News: For some reason, they overpolled by 35 blacks. This is about 3% of the whole sample. Assuming that, 1) they almost all went left, and 2) black turnout usually is lower than white turnout, the actual re-elect number is probably over 50%.

As for the moderation in the President's policies, I certainly don't subscribe to the Karl Rove puppet-master theory. But Rove has spoken before of wanting to build a lasting Republican majority. (Maybe that's why Dean came out so strongly against McKinley today.) This is off the top of my head, but we can only do this if 1) conservative walk away 5 years from now convinced that "Bush was one of us," and moderates come away thinking "Bush was one of us." It will help keep the conservatives from being too hungry for a "genuine conservative," while showing enough results for the moderates not to start looking elsewhere.