Mission Accomplished: AP Manufactures 60% Approval Rating for Obama

[Geee]

Human Events:

It made sense that President Obama received a mild approval spike in the wake of the Osama bin Laden killing, and his current average according to Real Clear Politics stands at 51.8% approval. Yet until today most polls reflected a number in the high 40s or low 50s. So how on earth did the Associated Press come up with Obama receiving a whopping 60% approval?

President Barack Obama's approval rating has hit its highest point in two years — 60 percent — and more than half of Americans now say he deserves to be re-elected, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll taken after U.S. forces killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

In worrisome signs for Republicans, the president's standing improved not just on foreign policy but also on the economy, and independent Americans — a key voting bloc in the November 2012 presidential election — caused the overall uptick in support by sliding back to Obama after fleeing for much of the past two years.

Now it would be to their advantage to think independents are flocking back to Obama, so where are they represented in the AP poll? Ed Morrissey notes the sleight of hand.

The Dem/Rep/Ind breakdown in this poll is 46/29/4, as AP assigned most of the leaners to the parties. That is a 17-point gap, more than twice what was seen in the 2008 actual popular vote that elected Obama. It only gets worse when independents are assigned properly. When taking out the leaners, the split becomes — I’m not kidding — 35/18/27. Oh, and another 20% “don’t know.” That’s significantly worse than the March poll, in which the proper D/R/I was 29/20/34, and far beyond their post-midterm sample of 31/28/26. It’s pretty easy to get Obama to 60% when Republicans are undersampled by almost half.

[AceRimmer]

This wasn't a real poll, it was something that Goebbels and Baghdad Bob cooked up in the RATS basement...

[Pepper]

This is good news. The more they hype the hype, the higher the monkey up the tree, the bigger the fall, all that stuff.