August 24, 2007

Explaining DiFi's ratings

Sara Nichols is fuming that the latest Field Poll shows DiFi so much more popular than Congress overall, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi in particular. She says how can this be, given, in her view, the fact that so many of Feinstein's more conservative positions are "out of the mainstream" of California voters.

But that's the answer. They're not. Democrats represent less than half of the electorate, and liberal Dems are less than half of that. Look at the spread of the numbers:

Feinstein has the approval of 74 percent of the Democrats, but she also has 39 percent of the Republicans and 49 percent of the independents.

Pelosi gets 56 percent from Democrats, and only 19 percent from Republicans and 36 percent from independents.

So while Nichols is peeved at Pelosi for not being liberal enough, it's a good bet that most Republicans and independents see the speaker as too partisan, and too polarizing. If Pelosi were to satisfy Nichols by bashing Bush more often and trying to pass left-wing legislation, the speaker would be even less popular among Republicans and independents, and her approval rating would probably fall even further.

Nichols does make a good point when she asks, by implication, why even strong liberals rate Feinstein (71-15) higher than Pelosi (61-16). Here I think Pelosi does lose ground because she's not been as partisan as her backers had hoped, while even strong libs seem to simply respect Feinstein as an elder stateswoman of California politics and not hold her more conservative views against her. Their real favorite, however, is Barbara Boxer, who gets a stellar 77-6 approval rating from the far left slice of California's electorate.

Among voters describing themselves as "middle of the road," who make up about half the sample, Feinstein's approval rating is 59-24, while Boxer's is 51-28 and Pelosi's is 38-32.

Posted by dweintraub on August 24, 2007 9:58 AM