The Gamut

From Dan Froomkin

In what may turn out to be one of the biggest free-falls in the history of presidential polling, President Bush's job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

The drop among blacks drove Bush's overall job approval ratings to an all-time low of 39 percent in this poll. By comparison, 45 percent of whites and 36 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Bush is doing.

This could be the lynchpin, the turning point that brings the black vote all the way back to where it belongs.

No, I'm not saying that democrats own the black vote. I'm saying that blacks who voted for Bush did so largely for the wrong reasons. I have an earlier post about these reasons, and while they are not reasons unique to black voters, black voters who went red are - like other religious liberals - voting against their own best interest for hope that promises the right has no intention of meeting will be met.

Later in the article, we find this.

This latest poll included 807 people nationwide, and only 89 blacks. As a result, there is a considerable margin or error -- and the findings should not be considered definitive until or unless they are validated by other polls.

....

But down to 2 percent? "I doubt that it's actually 2," he said.

"But would I be surprised if it's 10 or 12? No." And 10, he said, is typically "about as low as you can go" when it comes to approval ratings.

Unfortunately, this is probably true. For example, while it is considered a truism that Hitler was a monster, if you actually put the question to people, "Was Hitler's 'Final Solution' a good idea?" you would probably get at least 10 racists in 100 who would say that it was. That's the problem with opinion polls, no group ever sees anything 100%, no mater how obvious it is.