Regular readers, if there are any, may recall my notion of the "Romney handicap," a figure calculated by subtracting President Obama's net job approval from his margin over Mitt Romney in a general election trial heat in any given poll. Well, here's an oddity. A recent CNN/ORC poll showed Obama with 48/47 approval numbers, for a +1 margin. They also show general election results of Obama 53%, Romney 41%. That's a +12 margin, for an 11-point Romney Handicap. But the weird thing is, that same poll showed Mitt Romney with 44/43 favorability numbers, an identical margin to Obama's approval rating. Weird, right? Why, if he's equally popular, is Mitt Romney giving Obama so much of a handicap?
Well, it's because this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, favorability versus approval. Obama's favorability numbers in this same poll are 56% favorable, 42% unfavorable. So he's got a +14 margin on favorability, Romney's got a +1 margin, and when you run them against each other Obama's got a +12 margin. Sounds about right. This makes me wonder whether the focus on approval rating might not be misplaced. Perhaps we should be looking at favorability ratings; after all, you can't have an approval rating for a challenger. Maybe the true rule isn't that Presidents need 50% approval to win re-election, but rather 50% favorability. Or maybe I'm just taking one slightly kooky poll result and drawing way too many conclusions from it. But it's a phenomenon to keep an eye on, if you like keeping an eye on esoteric polling phenomena.
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