This is a few months old, but its still very intriguing. It’s interesting (although not unexpected) that major surges in nationalism and presidential support, and major events concerning national security, occur around the same time. It would be interesting to see a graph of “Government Expansion” or even “Personal Freedoms Lost” overlayed onto this timeline.
That point aside, it is also interesting to see the general results of the certain firms doing the polling. Whether it has to do with their own “corporate bias” (maybe a little), mere coincidence (possibly), or their target audience (most likely), the companies like Harris, Newsweek, Zogby, Pew, and CBS/NYT all seem to be under (in some cases way under) the average approval rating, and ABC/WP, Fox, and Gallup all seem to be above it.
Hardly a scientific analysis by any means, but just my 2 cents. I’m probably overanalyzing what is just a simple scatterplot.
