Crunching Numbers

Tobin Harshaw at the New York Times Opinionator caught this (it popped up on Memeorandum). Charles Franklin over at Pollster.com has crunched a lot of poll results for a long period of time and has found something very interesting. There has been a very well defined shift in public opinion about the war in Iraq. That is not to say that the numbers are positive - they are not. But the shift in "war going well" opinion has been trending up, steadily, since July. The "going badly" numbers have shown a mirror image drop. These results are the compilation of several well respected polls and the graphs are pretty striking. Franklin writes:

The single most striking shift is the change in opinion about how the war in Iraq is going. After four and a half years of steady downward trends, there has been a reversal of direction since July.

CBS, CNN and Pew have asked "How well is the military effort in Iraq going?" since the war started (with some minor variation in wording. See the details here.) The virtue of this question is its consistent use over time and its summary evaluation of the war.

President Bush's change of policy in Iraq in January, coupling a change of command with a surge of troop levels did not produce immediately positive responses from the public. Likewise the rise in U.S. casualties in the spring following the change in deployment strategy certainly might have been expected to further erode support for the war and for Bush.

But in retrospect the actions have been accompanied by two phases of changing opinion on "how the war is going". From January through June, the long running collapse in positive evaluation of the war (especially in the second half of 2006) halted. The flattening now appears to have clearly coincided with the change in command and troop levels.

This flattening didn't signal rising opinion on the war– but after dropping over 13 percentage points in six months, simply arresting the collapse was a major plus for the administration. And this is a particularly striking thing given that the spring of 2007 was a focal point for critiques of the war in Congress, with Democratic leadership repeatedly pushing votes that would have required changes in Iraq policy of various kinds. And this flattening came at the same time that casualties rose.

The second phase of opinion change started in early July, when positive evaluations of the war took their first upturn since late 2003 (around the time of the capture of Saddam Husein). The trend estimate has turned up some 8 percentage points since July 1, still not back to early 2006 levels, but remarkable this late in an unpopular war and with a weak leader and determined opposition.

Harshaw at the Times noted a fast response remark from Kevin Drum:

“So: over the past three months the PR campaign from General Petraeus combined with the decline in casualties has produced about a five point increase in the number of people who think the war is going well. But over the same time, it’s also produced a three or four point increase in the number of people who oppose the war. Apparently, the American public increasingly opposes the war regardless of how well it’s going.”

Harshaw also dryly notes:

It’s a good point, but I suspect some will feel Mr. Drum shows a bit too much pleasure in making it.

Regular readers know I don't think much of snapshot poll results. Trends are another thing entirely. Franklin has done a bang up job of getting all this data together - and the data shows a definite pattern. There appears to be some change in public opinion that is quite real. Of course, a great deal can happen between now and the election. But I actually rather suspect that these numbers are why the Democrats have dialed back their rhetoric a bit lately. That would seem to fit the trend as well. (It's worth reading all of Franklin's analysis - he makes a number of very good points that bear thinking about.)