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Bad Mood, Harriet Miers, Hurricane Katrina, Satisfaction, Height

Bad Mood, Harriet Miers, Hurricane Katrina, Satisfaction, Height

Bad Mood

There are stretches of time when little news emanates from the White House, and there are other times when it seems all the news focuses on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This is a time that resembles the latter situation more than the former. President George W. Bush and his administration are at the center of a great deal of news coverage -- and will probably remain so over the next few weeks. 

There's the ongoing saga of the pending confirmation process for Bush's Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, the implications of the constitutional vote in Iraq, and the continuing investigations into the conduct of key Bush strategist Karl Rove and the role he may have played in the now-famous Valerie Plame CIA leak case.

There is little question that news coverage of all these issues has taken its toll on the public's ratings of the president. The weekend CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll puts Bush's job approval rating at 39%. That's the lowest of his administration -- one point below the 40% approval rating Gallup measured at two previous points in September and in August. Fifty-eight percent of Americans say they disapprove of Bush's performance. Although this doesn't represent a massive deterioration, it confirms that the public continues to have significant concerns about Bush administration policies and actions.

As usual, Bush's ratings are highly polarized. He is holding on to an 84% approval rating among Republicans, but has just 32% approval among independents and 8% among Democrats.

It's not just the president. The 29% approval rating for Congress in the weekend poll is as low as Gallup has measured since 1994. The percentage of Americans who say they approve of the job Congress is doing has been around the mid-30s in recent months, which was itself a drop from the average in previous years. Perhaps we shouldn't be shocked by this considering the former Republican leader of the House (Tom DeLay) and the Republican leader of the Senate (Bill Frist) are in the midst of controversy. 

There's more. Only 31% of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the country today, again as low as we have seen it since the mid-1990s. Americans are clearly in a negative mood.

Harriet Miers

There is no legal reason to monitor public opinion when it comes to nominees for U.S. Supreme Court vacancies. The president makes the nomination and it is up to the Senate to confirm or reject it with a simple majority vote. Presumably the Senate could act in ways that are directly contrary to public opinion on a nominee, if it so desired. Nevertheless, given that the United States is a representative democracy, we at Gallup feel it's important to monitor what the public is thinking about key decisions like this one.

While most Americans don't know the specifics about Miers' background, they have certainly been exposed to the basics by this point. What is their current reaction? The weekend CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 44% of Americans say that the Senate should vote in favor of Miers serving on the Supreme Court, while 36% say the Senate should not. 

We have some comparison for that sentiment. Gallup asked Americans five times about John Roberts, the nominee recently confirmed by the Senate as the new chief justice. His "vote in favor" numbers ranged from a low of 51% in early August to a high of 60% in Gallup's last poll that included this question, conducted Sept. 16-18. The high point for opposition to Roberts was 28%.

The interesting twist in the Miers situation is that Democrats have stayed above the fray so far, apparently enjoying the spectacle of Republicans arguing among themselves about her nomination. There has been much talk about conservative opposition to the Miers nomination, but our poll shows very predictable patterns of support for Senate confirmation: 61% of conservative Americans say the Senate should confirm her (21% say no), compared with 38% of moderates and 28% of liberals. The relative differences among these three groups are roughly in line with what we found for Roberts' nomination.

Should Bush perhaps withdraw Miers' nomination as a result of the firestorm of criticism? The public says no -- 46% feel Bush should continue to support her, while 36% say he should drop her nomination. Conservatives say Bush should continue to support Miers by a 55% to 26% margin -- a positive reaction to be sure, but hardly a unanimous endorsement.

The public's overall impression of Miers is quite mixed: 31% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of her, 26% unfavorable, and 43% don't yet have an opinion. Again, conservatives and Republicans are the most positive, but even they are not overwhelmingly so at this point.

Hurricane Katrina

In conjunction with CNN and USA Today and with the cooperation of the American Red Cross, Gallup released a special study last week focusing on victims of Hurricane Katrina. The study was based on a random sample drawn from the list of more than 460,000 Katrina victims who had applied for financial assistance from the Red Cross. Respondents were interviewed by telephone -- some by landline, some by cell phone -- at the locations where they were currently residing. About 26% of those interviewed were originally from the city of New Orleans; the rest were originally from other parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Gallup Poll Senior Editors David Moore and Lydia Saad have analyzed many of the findings from the study in depth at galluppoll.com. To my mind, here are four of the most interesting conclusions from the study:

  1. Many New Orleans residents don't necessarily want to go back home again.This is important, because New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin last week publicly asked displaced residents of his city to return to help get the city back on its feet again. Here's what the study found: Only 22% of New Orleans residents said they would definitely return, 28% said they would probably return, while 39% said that they would probably or definitely not return.

    Contrary to popular speculation, it appears that it wasn't just a lack of money, transportation, or other wherewithal that kept many New Orleans residents from evacuating before Katrina hit. The study identified those individuals who lived in New Orleans and who indicated that they did not evacuate, and asked them why. Their No. 1 reason was that they didn't think the storm would be that bad (in fact, if the levees had not broken, the storm per se would not have caused catastrophic damage to New Orleans). Only about a third said they didn't evacuate New Orleans because they didn't have the money or transportation available.
  1. Despite being roundly reviled for its lackluster response to the hurricane, the Federal Emergency Management Agency received some good marks from Katrina victims. Asked "what government agencies have been most helpful to you, personally, since Hurricane Katrina," 49% volunteered FEMA. Of course, when asked which government agency they had been "least satisfied with in their response to any problems that you, personally, have had since Hurricane Katrina," 26% of Katrina victims volunteered FEMA for that more negative designation as well.
  1. The study underscored the great significance of family, religion, and friends in helping people get through a crisis. Thirty-seven percent of those interviewed said their family was most important in helping them get through this difficult emotional time, followed by 27% who mentioned their personal religion, and another 16% who said help from their friends, neighbors, and fellow community members was most important.
  1. What Katrina victims need most now is money. A third said that financial aid was the type of assistance most required in order to recover from Hurricane Katrina, followed by 15% who said they need a home, apartment, or place to stay, and another 13% who said they need help with damages to their home.

Satisfaction

The results of a massive government study of workplace satisfaction among government employees were recently released. According to a recent article in The New York Times, the basic data were collected by the Office of Personnel Management in 2004, and recently released on a government Web site.

There are other ways of looking at government departments, of course. Gallup's 2005 Governance poll asked average Americans to rate their satisfaction with the way the government handled each of 17 different areas. The areas were generally those associated with various Cabinet departments and agencies.

Americans are most satisfied with areas corresponding to the responsibilities of the Departments of Interior (defined as "national parks and open space"), Defense, Agriculture, Transportation, and Homeland Security. 

Interestingly, the agency reported by The New York Times as having the lowest level of employee satisfaction is the Department of Homeland Security, which itself was cobbled together from various departments and agencies as a result of an Act of Congress passed into law in 2002. Americans, however, are relatively satisfied with the country's "homeland security" at this point in time.

The five areas of government responsibility with which the general public is least satisfied are: the nation's finances, the poverty rate, health and human services, energy policy, and response to natural disasters. 

Height of Your Life

It's difficult to quantify exactly what influence a person's height has on his or her chances in life, although conventional wisdom has it that both males and females who are substantially above or below the average height of their peers meet certain challenges in their lives.

A recent Gallup/Pfizer project asked a random sample of adult Americans questions on just this topic. The results confirm the hypothesis that whatever the reality of the situation, Americans believe that height can make a significant difference in one's life. 

Across the board, Americans say that a man who is taller than average has better chances in life. Similarly, the vast majority of Americans say that a pre-teen or teenage boy who is taller than average has an advantage in terms of sports, being confident in social situations, and in making friends. 

These prevailing perceptions lead to fascinating assumptions about the positive role of height in making an individual a more attractive mate in adolescence and early adulthood. It's unclear, of course, whether height has any practical role today in making -- for example -- a computer programmer or doctor more effective in his or her job, but the presumption is that these norms are a holdover from an earlier period in human development, when physical strength was more crucial to survival. 

Of course, the high level of the public's agreement on these assumptions about the impact of height suggests various implications going forward. It suggests that many people still consider height when deciding on a mate, and also calls to our attention the intriguing -- and controversial -- prospect that genetic interventions could someday be used to change the height of one's offspring.

Author(s)

Dr. Frank Newport is a Gallup Senior Scientist and the author of Polling Matters (Warner Books, 2004) and The Evangelical Voter.


Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/19297/bad-mood-harriet-miers-hurricane-katrina-satisfaction-height.aspx
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