[Hoot Gibson]

No I can't. What does it even mean to say that you "strongly approve" -- or disapprove -- of what any politician does? On Obama, if you -- for example -- agree with him on healthcare but disagree on stimulus, do you "strongly agree" with him or "strongly disagree"? Is one more heavily weighted than the other? These polls are really just either party affiliation or general "mood of the country" questions. They are worthless unless you want "scientific" evidence that things are great or that they suck.

At one time, I had the same opinion that you have about polls. Over the years, I have realized that political polls, unlike sports polls, really do matter. Polls influence who donates to campaigns and the size of their donations.

Bad poll numbers can also discourage supporters from donating their time to work to get candidates elected. People want to make a difference, but most people do not want to spend time and money supporting candidates that they know cannot win.

Rasmussen may be the best pollster in the business and he is not partisan as far as I can tell. Politicians can and do hire their own pollsters to slant questions and samples to project a phony view of how their campaign is going but most people ignore polls that are obviously biased.

It is unfortunate that polls do impact election results but the earlier pollsters start publishing survey results, the more impact on elections they have.

Rasmussen asks the question pretty much as I did in this poll and leaves it up to respondents to put meaning to the words. Except for a few holidays, he publishes the Daily Presidential Tracking Poll continuously and the questions are always the same. He takes the difference between the strongly approve and strongly disapprove numbers and reports the result as the Presidential Approval Index. People who feel strongly about the President's performance are less likely to change the way that they will vote over a short period of time.