Now, not disputing that Biden’s favorable ratings have fallen more than one might expect — and not disputing that this might inspire a “will Obama dump Biden in 2012″ pseudo-news narrative that is going to be sort of excruciating for three years — it’s got to be noted that Gallup’s average includes the massive popularity/approval surge that Cheney, and everyone else in the administration, received after the events of 9/11. A look back at pre-9/11 polls finds that Cheney’s popularity started in the high 50s and low 60s and fell as low as the high 40s — although in those days, when he was known more for battling some heart problems than for pushing for neoconservative foreign policies, he often outpaced President Bush.

What’s the meaning of all this for the White House? Nothing, really — being less popular means being less popular. But the massive shift in public opinion after 9/11 is going to have a distorting effect on presidential polling — I think it saves Bush from having the lowest average ratings during his entire presidency since Truman — and that’s worth remembering.

The survey found the most dramatic drops in party affiliation, perhaps unsurprisingly, among college students (10 percentage points) and those who seldom or never attend church (nine percentage points). However, the GOP has also suffered a nine-point loss in the Midwest, traditionally a party stronghold.

This graph puts the near-term problems facing the Republican Party into perspective:

With the electorate continuing to trend away from the party after two consecutive drubbings at the polls — and with party leaders seemingly unconcerned about the defection of 30-year Senate veteran Arlen Specter to the Democrats — the GOP’s conservative base appears to be cocooning into itself and running away with the party. The question that remains to be answered is how this strategy can result in a Republican Party that is electorally viable on a national level.

That suggests, I think, that voters are capable of wanting a thorough airing of precisely what happened and when, even if they don’t necessarily oppose the use of torture.

Why not be cynical and suggest that Bush administration officials don’t have anything to fear in the court of public opinion from a thorough airing of what they authorized? The court of, you know, law is, of course, a different story.

Now Gallup has a new poll that confirms this trend and, for the first time in 25 years of polling, shows that most Americans would prioritize the economy at the expense of the environment.

Gallup (click to enlarge)

Since 1985, Gallup has asked people annually if they would prioritize the environment “even at the risk of curbing economic growth” or the economy “even if the environment suffers to some extent.” Last year, people selected the environment by a margin of 49 percent to 42 percent. This year, the numbers essentially flipped: 51 percent chose the economy and 42 percent chose the environment.

Never before had the majority of respondents prioritized the economy, though the numbers were close at the end of George W. Bush’s first term as president.

While last week’s poll showed a significant decrease in environmental concerns, the shift in this poll is far more dramatic, with a clear reversal of previous trends.

Not surprisingly, responses differed sharply with party identification. Noteworthy are the data among independents, 50 percent of whom choose the economy, to just 42 percent for the environment:

Gallup (click to enlarge)

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In another clear reversal of previous trends, record numbers of people are following our Twitter feed. You can join them here.

iStockphoto

As the Obama administration moves forward with its green agenda, climate change concerns have been elevated to a top priority. Yet in the midst of the deepening economic crisis, public opinion appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A Gallup poll released last Wednesday found a six percent drop from last year in the number of people who are worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about global warming, after that number had been increasing for the previous five years. It also showed that after a similar five-year climb, the percentage of respondents who believe that the effects of global warming have already begun had decreased by eight points over the past year. A record-high 16 percent of Americans now believe that global warming will never occur; in more than ten years of polling, no more than 11 percent of respondents had ever expressed this opinion.

The day after the poll was released, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a leading climate change skeptic, took to the Senate floor and celebrated the results as a triumph of information. “You should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people,” he proclaimed. “Sadly, that is exactly what the promoters of man-made climate fears have been consistently doing, and the American people have consistently rejected climate alarm.”

Inhofe attributed the shift in public opinion to new studies from prominent scientists that he said contradicted the prevailing climate change arguments embraced by former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists,” he said.

Gallup (click to enlarge)

On the other side of the climate debate, the Center for American Progress’ Joseph Romm, an acting assistant secretary of energy under Bill Clinton and an influential environmental activist, also chalked the changing attitudes up to a change in propaganda, albeit with a different slant.

“Objectively, in the last two years, the science makes painfully clear that climate risk has grown sharply,” he wrote on his blog, Climate Progress. “That means if the public has come to the reverse view, it must be due to the messaging and the media and the misinformers.” While “the vast majority of scientists are consistently bad at messaging,” he explained, global warming skeptics have “never stopped their single-minded disinformation campaign.”

Yet public opinion experts have a different explanation for the poll results.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, argues that the economic downturn has trumped all other concerns. “In a time of economic crisis, people are less willing to focus on an issue like global warming because they see other, more pressing issues,” he said.

A similar phenomenon took place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dimock explained. “In January 2002, a few months after 9/11, the public’s sense of priority on a whole host of important issues just fell through the floor,” he said. “They expected the government, almost to the exclusion of other important things, to focus on this issue.”

Karlyn Bowman, who studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, published a comprehensive report in April 2008 that tracked polls on the environment and global warming over the past several decades. Her data showed that in the three years following the 9/11 attacks, fewer people said they were worried about global warming than in any other year in the past decade.

Similarly, she argues, the economic crisis has now pushed environmental considerations aside. “The economy is just swamping all other issues right now,” she said. “Nothing else comes close.”

According to Paul Mohai, a professor of environmental policy and public opinion at the University of Michigan, this trend fits into historical patterns. “It’s not unusual at all that when there are economic problems in the country, concerns about the environment drop off,” he said.

Pew Research Center (click to enlarge)

The current economic crisis, of course, is the most severe in decades, and the Gallup poll is not the first to show its effects on public attitudes toward climate change. Every January, Pew conducts a poll to assess people’s “top priorities” for the government to address. This year, global warming came out on the very bottom of the list.

“Out of the 19 things that we ask people to rank as priorities, it’s number 19,” said Dimock. Only 30 percent of respondents considered global warming a “top priority,” down from 38 percent in 2007 and 35 percent in 2008. Other non-economic concerns likewise tumbled down people’s list of priorities, including crime, immigration and “protecting the environment” generally.

While the economy is likely the leading cause of reduced concern about global warming, these experts also posit a number of other possible explanations. Bowman and Mohai argue that Americans tend to feel less worried about a problem when they believe that the government is addressing it. In this case, confidence in President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership to tackle global warming has led people to feel less personally worried about the issue. “During Republican administrations, people’s concerns about the environment go up, and during Democratic administrations they go down,” said Mohai.

Bowman’s 2008 study backs up this claim. In every poll she recorded since 1971, people have had greater confidence in the Democratic Party to protect the environment. In the latest poll included in her study, a February 2008 Pew poll, 65 percent of respondents expressed greater confidence in Democrats on this issue, compared to just 21 percent for Republicans.

Dimock, on the other hand, points to Al Gore’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” as a possible complement to the economic causes of the change in public opinion. He hypothesizes that as a highly polarizing figure, Gore may have solidified Democratic support for his environmental agenda while turning off some Republicans and independents. “You can imagine how, with people feeling like Al Gore was lecturing them on global warming, so to speak, they might have some sort of backlash, because it was no longer coming from a neutral source. It was coming from a political source.”

Nonetheless, Dimock believes that the struggling economy is far and away the primary cause of the shift in public opinion. “The 800-pound gorilla is this economic crisis,” he said.

Inhofe’s claim that the change stems from the propagation of new scientific studies that cast doubt on man-made global warming theories garnered little support from these experts. “If that is indeed happening, I haven’t seen it on the news, and I follow it pretty closely,” said Mohai.

So what might cause Americans to renew their global warming concerns? In the lingo of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it’s the economy, stupid.

“If and when people feel more comfortable about the economy turning around, their focus can turn to other issues,” said Dimock.

Just as President Obama has tied his economic agenda to an environmental one, it appears that Americans’ global warming concerns will rise and fall with their 401(k)s.

I’m not surprised by this: I think Republicans have acted (and prematurely popped open champagne) on two assumptions that aren’t true right now.

The first is that voters rejected them in 2006 and 2008 because they spent too much money; the subtext is that voters oppose big government spending, and reward the party that cuts it down. This seems like a tautological argument that’s not backed up by history — how much did former President Ronald Reagan cut spending, after all? The second false assumption is that Republicans are winning the spin war because their arguments are leading newspaper articles, columns and TV broadcasts. There’s a Republican senator or congressman making the anti-stimulus case on cable at basically any moment.

The problem: So what? If a tree falls down during MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” does it make a sound? Americans don’t actually watch these shows, and they’re not coloring their opinions of the president.

UPDATE: Byron York sees another story:

Fox News Channel was up 23 percent in total viewers in the two weeks after the inauguration, compared to the two weeks before. In the same period, CNN was up just 5 percent, and MSNBC was down 1 percent. While you can’t conclude too much from that — research shows that Fox has a pretty diverse audience, with more Democratic viewers than CNN has Republican viewers — it’s clear Republicans are no longer averting their eyes. They’re in a good fight, and they like it.

They’re still losing, but now they’re doing it with more people watching.

Gallup also asked which of series of actions by the U.S. would improve views of American leadership. The main finding was that “residents in eight of the countries surveyed are most likely to say the United States’ withdrawal from Iraq would improve their opinion very significantly.”  Closing Guantanamo was also frequently cited, while a variety of economic and political reform suggestions received a degree of support varying by country.

Well, done and done, basically, and we’ve just entered Week Two of the next four years.

No one should be under the false impression that there’s any sort of magic bullet for repairing U.S. esteem in the Arab world. There are and will continue to be real points of divergence in interests — the U.S./Israel partnership, for instance, isn’t going to be jettisoned, to Arab chagrin. But what’s important — and what’s been lacking for eight years — is a presumption of basic good faith on the part of the United States, so that even when the United States acts on areas of mutual interest, the Arab public interprets those actions accordingly. That in turn requires visible U.S. action on issues of concern to the Arab public, despite political difficulties.

Seen in that light, it’s reasonable to expect leaving Iraq and shutting Guantanamo to earn the Obama administration some dividends — stuff that’s going to be important when the United States has to, say, extract difficult Arab acceptance of peace terms with Israel or launch Hellfire missiles at Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen or something.

According to a CNN poll released Wednesday, 75 percent of Americans support Obama’s cabinet nominations, including 71 percent who back his choice of Hillary Clinton for secretary of state and 83 percent who approve of his retaining Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. A Gallup poll released Monday showed similar numbers: 69 percent for Clinton and 80 percent for Gates.

Yet today’s Gallup tracking poll shows that Americans’ faith in Obama to be a good president hasn’t budged. In fact, Obama’s overall confidence numbers since November 23 have been remarkably stable, never climbing above 66 percent or dropping below 64 percent:

Of course, the rigidity of these numbers isn’t so surprising when you take a look at President Bush’s approval ratings, which have recently hovered between 26 and 29 percent:

The die-hard Republicans who continue to support Bush unflinchingly may not warm up to Obama no matter what he does. That Bush’s job approval is roughly equivalent to those who are not confident in Obama suggests that it will be tough for Obama to reduce his no-confidence rating to less than 25 percent. That means he’s doing about as well as he can, and barring a cataclysmic event like 9/11 — which boosted Bush’s approval numbers to an unprecedented 92 percent — he may have nowhere to go but down.

Obama did not gain any additional support in the poll since his generally well-reviewed acceptance speech on Thursday night.

None. Zip. Zero. Remember, the Democratic National Convention broke several records for overall viewers. Day Two drew five times the ratings of the same day in 2004. Day Four, Obama’s address, shattered convention records, topping ratings for “American Idol,” the most-watched night of the Olympics and the Oscars. (The Oscars!) The speech thrilled delegates and was heralded across the spectrum — including this striking praise from conservative Pat Buchanan. If the story ended there, Obama would have surely netted some increase in the polls.

Before the Mile High Speech sunk in at all, however, the McCain campaign dropped its bombshell news about Gov. Sarah Palin. People were shocked, riveted, excited and disconcerted. They were not thinking about Obama anymore. CNN’s new poll, like Gallup, shows no bounce for Obama. CNN Polling Director Keating Holland explains that there were two bounces — or maybe none:

The convention, and particularly Obama’s speech, seems to be well-received. And the selection of Sarah Palin as the GOP running mate also seems to be well-received. So why is the race still a virtual tie? Probably because the two events created equal and opposite bounces assuming that either one created a bounce at all.

Now, maybe you’d like a slightly more definitive analysis from the person in charge of the poll, but Holland is candidly noting that tracking polls are inexact and the non-bounce is hard to read. If by “opposite bounces,” however, he means that an equal number of supporters of each candidate switched places, that’s the less likely explanation. More likely, the undecideds and soft conservatives — who might have been temporarily swayed by Obama’s big night — stopped in their tracks with the Palin news. That’s discouraging, naturally, for all those people who reflexively assume that Palin is hurting McCain. Take The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, who emphasizes that undecided voters claim they dislike the pick:

[A]mong the critical undecideds, the Palin pick made only 6 percent more likely to vote for McCain; and it made 31 percent less likely to vote for him. 49 percent said it would have no impact, and 15 percent remained unsure.

So they say. But survey interviews are a “performance of an ideal self,” as the writer Alexander Provin explains so perfectly in a review of pollster John Zogby’s new book. People may not want to admit — to themselves, let alone pollsters — that the running mate affects their vote, or that the simple addition of a woman to the GOP ticket is making them give McCain a second look. Most say the pick is irrelevant (49 percent) or bad (31 percent). Meanwhile, in the aggregate, the same voters appear to be sticking by McCain, defying the usual trends, after Obama’s tremendously successful convention.