CBS News/New York Times Poll Finds No Bounce For Bush

by Steve

37%.

Well, you can flush yesterday’s Gallup poll down the toilet as just another outlier. Tonight, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll came out, showing that Bush’s approval rating is still at 37%, where it has been stuck since July when it was at 36%. So much for that bounce from all of this “fear and smear” talk. And this poll had four percent more Bush 2004 voters than the actual result that year.

Some of the poll’s other findings are very startling:

Only 18% say things are going better today than they were five years ago, with an overwhelming 60% saying things are worse today.

Bush’s ratings on his handling of the war on terror have not gone up since August. Only 12% of registered voters think Bush is telling the truth about how things are going in Iraq.

Democrats have a fifteen-point edge in the generic ballot question (50%-35%), a five-point increase since July. Seventy-seven percent of registered voters think it is time for new people in Congress.

Sixty-eight percent of the respondents said that they couldn’t name one thing that Congress had done in the last year that stood out in their minds. And 63% said they would be voting based on national issues rather than a candidate’s position on local issues, dealing a blow to the GOP’s hopes of localizing each race.

Democrats are perceived already as being likely to win more seats than the Republicans (by a 54%-32% margin), thereby overcoming the image of being losers.

Sixty-two percent think it matters a great deal who controls Congress.

Hillary has a higher favorability rating (32%) than John McCain (28%).

52% of registered voters have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, whereas only 40% have a favorable opinion of the GOP. By a 2-1 margin, respondents thought the Democratic candidates would tell the truth about Iraq as compared to GOP candidates.

Fifty-six percent think that using torture to gain information from suspected terrorists is never justified while only 35% think it is sometimes justified.