What a Difference the Price of Gas Makes

There’s a lot of ink being used and bandwidth being burned today on the LA Times’ piece about the improving national mood on the economy.

There’s also a lot of movement in the American Research Group’s monthly poll on George Bush and the economy — actually just the economy part, not George Bush. Up to now, it has been a case study of 527 Media success at convincing people that an economy with 4% annual growth during the past three years and 4.7% unemployment is in fair or lousy shape. It also needs to be remembered that ARG’s poll is of “telephone households,” with no apparent attempt to determine if the survey participant is a likely voter, or even a registered voter.

Well, the September 18-21 ARG survey turned pretty dramatically from August to September. True, the approval/disapproval numbers on Bush (38%/57%) and Bush’s handling of the economy (33%/61%) only ticked up a point or two. But since Bush is not on the November ballot, I would suggest that the following results are more important:

• On the national economy, the “Getting better” response has more than doubled, with most of the gain coming from “Getting worse” –
  

• On the economy a year from now, the “Worse than today” response is down almost half from two months ago –
  

• Then there’s “The Stupid Question.” It’s stupid because it doesn’t matter what people think, by definition we’re not in a recession. But since ARG asks, it’s worth knowing how many people will admit to being stupid, and it has dropped bigtime:
  

• Finally, the “Getting better” response took 22% away from “Getting worse” in the question about current household financial situation:
  

I believe that non-voters generally tend to pay less attention to the news, especially news about the economy, and that the economic news they do hear and see is more likely to come from The 527 Media. This should mean that ARG’s results, since they include non-voters, will typically reflect more economic pessimism than actual voters will have, and is more evidence that politicians running against the economy in this election may be making a very big mistake.