Kelly Ayotte's job rating gets another look. Politico discovers Gallup's review of its methodology. And PPP is asking about "hipsters" by talking to registered voters on their landline phones. This is the HuffPost Pollster update for Monday, May 13, 2013.
TWO MORE CHECK'S OF AYOTTE'S RATINGS - Two new telephone polls of New Hampshire voters give Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte net positive ratings. On a New England College survey, 48 percent of New Hampshire voters approve and 43 percent disapprove of Ayotte's job performance. On a second, conducted by Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center, Ayotte's favorable rating "remained steady (36.2 percent in 2012, 36.7 percent in 2013), but the Senator's unfavorable ratings rose more dramatically from 24 percent to 31 percent." Both polls also find Sen. Jeanne Shaheen leading Scott Brown in a hypothetical 2014 matchup. [NEC, Dartmouth]
PPP's April approval numbers for Ayotte were slightly worse. A widely covered poll conducted in late April by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) looked slightly worse for Ayotte: 44 percent approved of Ayotte's performance, while 48 percent disapproved. However, like the NEC poll, PPP found a far bigger increase in Ayotte's disapproval rating since late 2012 (up from 35 to 46 percent) than a drop in her approval percentage (from 48 to 44). [PPP]
GALLUP'S FINALIZING THEIR 2012 REVIEW, AND POLITICO IS ON IT. Politico's Kevin Cirilli: "After misreading the 2012 presidential election and facing criticism in the aftermath, Gallup polling has undertaken an internal review and will announce the findings next month. 'We are in the process of finishing a full review of all methodological issues relating to our 2012 election polling. The process is being led by a blue-ribbon group of outside experts. We will be reporting our findings at an event on June 4 at our offices in Washington,' Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport told POLITICO's Mike Allen in Playbook on Monday." [Politico]
News? - What's new here is that Gallup announced they will release their review "in early June in Washington." Except that Newport had already pre-announced the coming announcement last Thursday on his Polling Matters blog (something Pollster Update readers learned on Friday). The rest of the story about Gallup's internal review, as Newport himself reminded us in March, was old news back in February. [Newport blog, rejoinder to Pollster]
POLLING HIPSTERS - Speaking of PPP, they also asked a national sample of voters to rate "hipsters" and found just 16 percent have a favorable opinion, but 42 percent have an unfavorable opinion and 43 percent were not sure. They also found that "almost all" of the 10 percent that "consider themselves to be hipsters" are younger: "Half of all voters aged 18-29 consider themselves hipsters; every other age group is 5% or less." Keep in mind that PPP's automated methodology is blocked by law from calling mobile phones. So these are younger "hipsters" with landline phones. Who are also registered to vote. [PPP]
Pollster 'lucky' streak continues - Pew Research's Susannah Fox: "N=571 and I was one of them: 'Americans So Over Hipsters'...I was a respondent. Put it on speaker and LOL'd with younger son as I answered the questions." [@SusannahFox; see also "Polling the Pollsters"]
Twitter couldn't resist:
-TNR's Nate Cohn: "I still can't get over PPP deciding to conduct a survey about hipsters while only calling people w/landline telephones." [@electionate]
-MassINC pollster Steve Koczela: "Owning a landline is now youthfully ironic, perhaps?" [@skoczela]
-Political Scientist Kevin Collins: "If I tell a pollster that I identify as a hipster, but only do so ironically, am I really a hipster, or am I only pretending to be one?" [@kwcollins]
-NYT's Michael Roston: "I prefer Zogby's poll on this, you probably never read it" [@michaelroston]
MONDAY'S 'OUTLIERS' - Links to more news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:
-A majority of Americans support gay marriage, but most mistakenly think they're in the minority. [Gallup]
-Voters trust Hillary Clinton more than Republicans on Benghazi. [PPP]
-Voter views are unchanged on Benghazi after hearings. [Rasmussen]
-Political science says Benghazi and the IRS flaps are likely to become bigger problems for Obama. [Nyhan]
-A GOP internal poll shows gives Ed Markey a 3 point lead over Gabriel Gomez. Other polls this month showed Markey between 4 and 17 points ahead. [National Journal, Rothenburg Political Report]
-Republican pollster Jim Burston finds the Boston bombings had very little impact on American's views of terrorism. [POS]
-Republican pollsters will meet in Washington this week to discuss "why the party's surveys failed to predict the extent of Republican losses in 2012." [National Journal]
-Paul Taylor looks ahead to the Census demographics of 2060. [Pew Research]
-Larry Bartels shares new data on support for Obama in 2012 by income in the South and elsewhere. [Monkey Cage]
-Dave Weigel looks back at a "conservative poll un-skewer who basically called" the South Carolina election. [Slate]