Opinion Polls

The 2012 election has crossed a barrier. In the latest CNN poll, 40 percent of Americans say things are going well in the country. Is that good? After all, 60 percent still say things are going badly.

This month Obama poll watchers got some good news, and some bad news. This was capped off by the Washington punditocracy making a stupid comparison between polling for Obama and Carter.

A few months back, I mentioned to President Obama that we would be conducting a poll to assess Arab attitudes two years after his Cairo speech. Well, the results are in.

[Program Note: Last month, we ran this column four days before the end of May, due to travel plans. We promised we'd update the preliminary numbers i...

"What a difference a death makes." President Obama announced at the very beginning of the month that Osama bin Laden was dead, and his poll numbers reacted almost immediately.

April was a pretty miserable month for Barack Obama, mostly due to the high price of gasoline at the pump. But May is already shaping up to be one of Obama's best months ever, for one very obvious reason.

With Barack Obama's reelection announcement and the ever more frequent public statements from Republican primary contenders, the 2012 election cycle i...

While catastrophic world events dominated the news for most of the month, Obama's approval rating was being hit with a creeping domestic problem -- the rising price of gasoline.

In terms of shifts in public opinion, January and February were the best two months President Obama has yet had during his entire presidency.

When taken month-to-month, January, 2011, was Obama's best month of his entire presidency. Not only did he finally get his bump -- but it was a truly significant bump.

Obama once again charted an unbelievably stable month in terms of approval ratings. The mildly good news was in his disapproval rating, which dropped significantly over the course of December.

Obama just had his most stable month ever in the public opinion polls, capping off a remarkable year of polling stability. Were you to just read the headlines or listen to the soundbites, you may have a different impression.

Obama's approval rating ended the month on somewhat of an upswing, at 46.1 percent.Obama's approval rating stayed remarkably steady all month long.

What we find when we survey public opinion is a rich and varied landscape across the Arab World that defies stereotype.

Last month I rashly wrote that since Obama was starting the month on an upswing, he had a good chance of posting largish gains in September. This didn't happen.

Souvenir vendors in Washington say once-thriving sales of the garish merchandise fawning over the president are nowhere near what they were. Sales pea...

July had some political successes for Obama, but the public once again didn't give him any credit for passing Wall Street reform, or any of the other achievements Obama chalked up.

Obama, after gaining a bit in his average approval ratings in May, slipped back in June. But the reversal was slight, continuing a five-month streak of amazingly stable numbers.

Obama seems to have hit a plateau in his approval ratings, which have remained largely unchanged for the past three months. Could it be that we've all just made up our minds about the job the president is doing?

Democrats pulled ahead of Republicans on a generic congressional ballot -- 50 percent to 46 percent -- a new CNN/Opinion Research Poll released Tuesda...

Will Obama's presidency wind up charting a similar course as Carter, or will he recover as Reagan did? Only a fool would even contemplate making such a prediction at this point, that's all that really can be said.

Everyone was looking for a healthy bounce in Obama's poll numbers after health reform passed. This bounce has either failed to materialize yet, or is so gradual it likely won't end up being called a "bounce."

According to recent polls, some of the bad news for President Obama comes in the form of the widespread perception that America "is less respected in ...

The president's approval and disapproval numbers are within kissing distance. When will Obama turn this around? Will he turn this around?