Tag: approval ratings

Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, temporarily moving the COVID-19 pandemic, pandemic response, and the huge number of COVID cases and deaths worldwide attributed to the Omicron variant of SARS-COV-2 despite high levels of vaccinations and masking. So far however, President Biden does not appear to have gotten a boost from the rally around the flag/leader effect that, for example, boosted President George W. Bush’s approval ratings dramatically after the September 11, 2001 mass murder incidents, usually described as attacks on the United States. To be sure, so far there has not been a “New Pearl Harbor” such as 9/11 or a cyberattack or other direct attack on the United States blamed on Russia.

Polling data from Gallup, Rasmussen, and a broad sampling of popular polls all show no clear boost given the few probably few percent error rate of the polls, even a small one, from the Ukraine-Russia crisis so far:

All of the polls show a marked drop in Biden’s approval ratings in July-August of 2021. One cannot be certain of the reasons, of course, but this is when it became clear that the COVID vaccines worked poorly at best and did not prevent infection or transmission in the vaccinated, contrary to prominent super-confident statements by Biden and his administration that the vaccines would prevent infection in the vaccinated (something obviously untrue from the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials reports which reported some infections in vaccinated trial subjects).

The approval rating plots above were made with data copied from the referenced web sites on March 27, 2022 and plotted in LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet, a free open-source spreadsheet program similar to Excel, loosely an Excel “clone” although there are some differences.

(C) 2022 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.

About Me

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).