Hot Air Candidate Approval results

I’m going to start off with the Presidential picks even though it’s secondary to our main purpose, and then get to the nitty gritty in the rest of the data. As always, contact me if you have questions or comments; the number of approaches I could take to highlight the data are nearly endless, so tell me if you have a particular wrinkle in mind. 7222 readers participated in the survey.

Sarah Palin once again leads the Primary race among Hot Air readers. She is again followed by Herman Cain in second. Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels take third and fourth place respectively, while Mitt Romney leads a very tight pack of Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann, in fifth.

As always, the numbers are pretty consistent month to month, with the candidate spread widening as people leave the field and votes get reassigned.

There are a lot of ways to look at the favorability data, so since I’ve laid out the overall vote already, let’s start that way. As a reminder, favorability questions were based on a 1-to-7 scale, with 7 being the highest mark.

The blue line is the overall approval average of a candidate. The red line is a peer average — that is, the candidate’s favorability with those who said they voted for someone else. You’ll note that the peer average is always lower than the overall average, since candidates’ supporters have an interest in giving their person marks higher than everyone else.

Supporters on average gave their candidate a rating of 6.49. Non-supporters on average gave those candidates a 3.60 rating. The field as a whole was rated at 3.76, or roughly average-to-below average.

The following chart is sorted by average supporter rating. For what it’s worth, I think it’s fair to call this a measure of supporter “intensity.”

This next graph is the same as the graph above, but rearranged by peer average.

One bar sticks way out. Sarah Palin is well-liked at Hot Air even among those who don’t support her for President, but I think a lot of the flame wars that break out in the comments section are a result of this approval/intensity disparity. Lots of strong Palin supporters skew the overall average up, but when you remove those voters, you get an idea of where everyone else is at. You’ll also note that the farther to the left you go on this chart, the greater the “grassroots rockstar,” but approval doesn’t always translate into votes. Compare to the totals at the top of this post.

Since Donald Trump is presently newsworthy, I’ll also point out that he’s the second-least favored candidate in the Hot Air field. The least favored is, surprisingly, Jon Huntsman, who I didn’t think had yet garnered a high enough profile to illicit that kind of a distinction. We’ll see if that changes going forward.

The overall results follow for each candidate, broken down by rating. Again, this is without supporters removed.

We’ll do another formal Presidential survey in just a few weeks. Stay tuned.

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
To see the comments on the original post, look here.

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