Daily Research News Online no. 2823 - 'We Got Him' � But Did We Get a Boost in the Polls?

'We Got Him' � But Did We Get a Boost in the Polls?

December 23 2003

The capture of Saddam Hussein appears to have had a small if noticeable effect on American attitudes to the war in Iraq and views of the prospects for US troops remaining there, judging by results of a Harris Interactive survey which was in the field when the capture was announced. The effect on ratings of leading cabinet members (but not the President himself) is more marked.

Given the importance of the news, Harris has taken the unusual step of comparing results from two parts of the survey, one conducted in the three days before the capture and the other in the three days after. In total, 993 US adults (age 18+) were conducted by telephone between December 10 and 16. Harris stresses the lack of change, but there are movements of a few percent in the direction one might have predicted.

For some questions, the capture has more obvious relevance - the % believing that it is likely that 'the US will get bogged down for a long time in Iraq and not be able to create a stable government there' was 74% in October, 72% just before the capture and declined to 69% just after, with one possible figurehead for insurgents gone.

With other questions, a slight change seems just to reflect a more positive feeling about the whole US-Iraq scenario. There is no obvious connection between the capture and the accuracy of information from the government about WMD / Al Qaeda links or whether evidence of these things has been found since the war. However, the percentage believing that 'what we were told by the government before the Iraq war about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda was generally inaccurate' has declined from 51% to 47%, while the percentage who believe that 'clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction has been found in Iraq' has risen from 23 before the capture to 28% after. Perhaps 5% think Saddam himself constitutes a WMD - semantically, it's certainly arguable.

Meanwhile the same poll found that news of the capture gave a significant boost to the approval ratings of four key cabinet members, but not those of President Bush himself. Positive and negative ratings on 10-13 December (before) and 14-16 December (after) are as follows:

	Job	+ / - before	+ / - after
Donald Rumsfeld	Defense Secretary	47 / 44	57 / 38
John Ashcroft	Attorney General	41 / 45	51 / 37
Colin Powell	Secretary of State	66 / 27	74 / 22
Dick Cheney	Vice President	36 / 49	42 / 47
(President Bush		48 / 51	50 / 49)

These are the worst ratings Harris Interactive has reported for the president since September 11, 2001, and the highest negative ratings (and virtually equal to the lowest positive ratings) that Harris has reported since President Bush took office in January 2001.

The survey found little change in the importance of issues which the public thinks the government should address. In reply to an open-ended, unprompted question, the economy (28%) and 'the war' (17%) continue to head the list, followed by health care (16%), employment or jobs (12%), education (11%), Iraq (7%), homeland security (7%), Medicare (6%), defense (6%) and terrorism (5%). Health care is now at its highest point since 2001.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.