Michelle Obama, the Great Persuader
September 9th, 2012, 3:00pm by Sam Wang 29 Comments -->
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Yesterday, Gallup reported a big jump in their three-day rolling average of President Obama’s approval rating. Can we figure out what day it happened? Yes, and it shows how a single speech can move national opinion, even if only briefly.
Here is Gallup’s graph.
The last few individual data points plotted above (downloadable) look like this.
| Dates | Approve | Disappr |
| 08/26-28 | 43 | 47 |
| 08/27-29 | 44 | 47 |
| 08/28-30 | 45 | 46 |
| 08/29-31 | 45 | 46 |
| 08/30-09/1 | 43 | 48 |
| 08/31-09/2 | 45 | 48 |
| 09/1-3 | 45 | 48 |
| 09/2-4 | 47 | 47 |
| 09/3-5 | 49 | 45 |
| 09/4-6 | 52 | 43 |
| 09/5-7 | 52 | 42 |
In boldface is the post-DNC bump. This is quite notable: the last time the approval number went as high as 49% was June 9-11. This suggests that something happened to drive the numbers up suddenly on September 4th, the night of Michelle Obama’s speech.
Is this even possible? Michelle Obama’s ratings were through the roof. Nielsen estimated the viewership at about 50 million people, outstripping the entire RNC convention. Her speech went viral in China, providing independent verification of her broad appeal. Could it be that a significant fraction of US viewers improved their opinion of Barack Obama after hearing her?
Gallup does not release its single-day numbers. Mathematically, it is impossible to extract a unique set of one-day numbers from a rolling average. However, it is possible to surmise the likeliest set of numbers by adding one assumption.
Opinion is unlikely to fluctuate massively from day to day. We can calculate the set of one-day values that fluctuates the least from day to day. This assumption is easily implemented using an algorithm for variance minimization (MATLAB code here). Here is the result:
| Date | Approve | Disappr |
| 9/1 | 40.4 | 51.6 |
| 9/2 | 49.8 | 47.8 |
| 9/3 | 44.8 | 44.6 |
| 9/4 | 46.4 | 48.6 |
| 9/5 (Michelle+1) | 55.8 | 41.8 |
| 9/6 (Clinton+1) | 53.8 | 38.6 |
| 9/7 (Obama+1) | 46.4 | 45.6 |
From Sept. 4th to Sept. 5th-6th, a total swing of 16-17 points occurred. The United States has approximately 240 million citizens of voting age, so this means that a net 20 million people were flipped during that period. Evidently Michelle Obama was extremely persuasive, and maybe Bill Clinton too. But judging from the swing back on Sept. 7th, President Obama could not quite sustain the impact of the first two speakers.
There’s a chance that the “unrolling” process did not get things quite right, and Obama’s boost was actually sustained. If the Gallup 3-day average approval comes down to 49% in today’s release, we’ll know that the bump was a short-lived one. We will find out soon.
One imagines that the Obama campaign is planning to deploy the First Lady’s speech in more markets.
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Update, Sunday September 9th, 3:35pm: Here’s today’s data, unrolled. Looks like there’s still some elevation in job approval. So the bounce continues.
Tags: 2012 Election · President
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29 Comments so far ↓
Gallup’s 9/4-9/6 favorability poll is up now on RealClearPolitics. It’s 50/46.
ChrisD – Thanks. I’m on it. I was sitting on this post for about 16 hours, which is too bad. Anyway, see the update.
Nice analysis!
Maybe you’ve posted about this before, but I’m curious about why you didn’t do a comparable analysis for the Rasmussen election poll, which is also a 3-day average. Doing both Gallup and Rasmussen might reduce the overall margin of error? On 1-day data (i.e., unrolled data), the margin of error must be pretty big?
Carlos, including Rasmussen never decreases error, it increases it.
Rasmussen is a consistent outlier.
@Carlos Brody
You beat me to it! Today Rasmussen approval figure is 52% for Obama – a number that eluded him since January 2011. It is interesting to see that the OTHER Obama having this kind of impact.
We can speculate for the 2016 Democratic ticket: Clinton-Obama. Of course, that will mean Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama!
Tapen
@wheelers cat: we just want to look at the *changes* over time. It doesn’t matter if Rasmussen is consistently off by -5% or by +5%. The changes over time are what define a “bounce.” Those are informative independently of any bias in the mean.
@Tapen Sinha: I like! HC and MO for 2016!
@wheelers cat
Rasmussen itself may be biased but if you think about their time series data [X(t)], the level may be wrong but the differenced series will still have value. In other words, [X(t)-X(t-1)] would still be useful. And that is precisely the kind of thing that Sam is examining (e.g., did Akin, Michelle Obama or other discrete event produced any CHANGE in the time series). So, the point of Carlos is still very valid.
Tapen
Carlos – In principle that is a good idea. However, in the past I have had trouble with Rasmussen data. Its day-to-day variability is substantially lower than expected from sampling error. Therefore there is some odd normalization, for instance by party ID, that confounds the calculation. So…can’t do it, sorry.
@Carlos Brody
Damn! You beat me to it again!
Tapen
@Sam– thanks for the response, very interesting! Indeed, if a pollster’s margin of error doesn’t match their day-to-day variability that *has* to mean something is fishy.
And to follow up on @wheelers cat’s comment, the “fishiness” in that case is more than a simple bias in the mean. Which is maybe what @wheelers cat meant all along :)
An issue is that party ID is not a fixed character, but covaries with candidate preference. If one reweights to get a fixed fraction party ID, low variability results.
@Sam@Carlos
There goes my speculation! Rasmussen is using some sort of exponential smoothing of Holt Winters kind to tamp down the variability. Of course, they do not tell us that. But that seems to me the only rational explanation.
Tapen
On the party ID question, Gallup does give us that number
www.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx
If it does stay fixed (perhaps with Rasmussen), it will give us artificially low variability.
On another matter, one of my old students (I am not gonna say which country he/she is from) who is now doing a lot of internal polling of the Republicans for a polling firm tells me that the Republican numbers this week are looking really dismal in Ohio, Virginia and in particular in Wisconsin. Romney’s goose is well and truly cooked.
Tapen
Is minimizing day-to-day variance really the best approach to attempt to deconvolute the three day average? (Realizing that there are N data points and N+2 unknowns, so as you point out, there’s not a unique solution). Since the smoothing function covers three days, a bad guess for the two unconstrained parameters is likely to show up as an artificial periodicity of three days in the reconstructed data. In this case it’s unfortunate that the length of the conventions was also three days. By eye, the reconstructed data does look like it has some three day periodicity.
It may be useful to look at the Fourier transform of the reconstructed data to make sure there isn’t a peak corresponding to a three day periodicity. And also, to delete the last data point, and see how the best fit of the remaining data points varies–hopefully, not much.
baw1064 – good points. If you use too many days of data, bad solutions emerge. One could imagine a second additional, FFT-based criterion. The strike-one-day approach you suggest is effectively done in the update, which contains one more day of data. Looks ok.
@Carlos, Tapen
sry, but it will be Castro vs Rubio in 2016.
the Battle for the Browns.
sadly, Hillary is too old.
the trend is for presidential candidates to be in their forties.
re Rasmussen: he smells bad to me. he has no method transparency. Blumenthal and Silver have both written pieces on suspected data manipulation by Scott Rasmussen.
It is true that all information is valuable, and Dr. Wang uses robust statistics to extract the data.
This is simply a brilliant piece. I’m awestruck.
/salutes Dr. Wang with respect
oh goof.
I meant to say Rasmussen is an INconsistent outlier.
my bad.
@wheelers cat
Seems as if it works equally well with and without the “IN”.
My guess, for which I have no data, is that Rasmussen gets its right-leaning results by selecting a sample with a larger percentage of Republicans. If, as I also guess, Republicans are very unlikely to be anywhere remotely close to persuadable, wouldn’t that make the running total less volatile?