Way, way back, a long time ago, in the second week of June, I wrote a post about how Obama was slipping in the polls on several issues. While his overall approval numbers remained high, there are the beginnings of chinks in the armor. A spirited debate ensued (isn't that what blogs are all about, anyway?), and a challenge was laid out. I predicted that Obama's disapproval numbers on the economy will be higher than his approval numbers. Piker, after claiming that there is nothing wrong with his numbers now, and that everything is peachy at 1600 Pennsylvania, came out with this somewhat muddled prediction himself:
I call it muddled, because Piker never really gave us a baseline number to compare to "the average". In the original post, Obama's numbers for approval/disapproval spanned three different polling periods, early February, late March, and late May. I'm assuming Piker will use the late May numbers as his average, which is fine by me. Those numbers: Approve: 55% Disapprove 42%. I'm not going to try and get into his head on how he'll calculate how the numbers could "vary about 4 points on the average", or how "approval/disapproval spread will go no more than 4 points one way or the other". I'll let him try and explain to us how his "math" works to calculate those numbers.
This is why I kept it a simple as possible. My prediction was:
No "spread", no "average". One number will be higher than the other.
I recap all of this on this news, out today:
Gross domestic product fell 2.4 percent from the final three months of 2008, compared with the prior measurement of a 1.9 percent drop, the Office for National Statistics said today in London. The median prediction in a Bloomberg survey of 28 economists was for a 2.1 percent decline. Construction activity plunged almost three times as much as originally estimated.
Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said last week that Britain’s recovery from recession may turn out to be “a long, hard slog.” While business surveys have indicated the economic slump is easing, unemployment may continue to increase and net mortgage lending is the weakest since records began in 1993.
“In big picture terms, it doesn’t really change the outlook,” said Nick Kounis, an economist at Fortis Bank Nederland Holding NV in Amsterdam and a former U.K. Treasury official. “The recovery is unlikely to be very strong any time soon. There’s more bad news for consumers ahead.”
While the story is from the U.K., do you expect much of a difference when the U.S. numbers are released?
