O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum

Radio Free Monkey has picked up the mantle of the increasingly absent Prof. Pollkatz and started graphing such things as Bush job approval/disapproval spread and the particularly fascinating historical comparison. I think they still need a little graphical refinement, but it's nice that somebody is doing this.

As I've said before, charts like these are good to refer to when you see a news story that does some specious thing like treating the weekly change in a single poll number (or even the difference between two different polls in subsequent weeks!) as if it meant something. If opinion polls mean anything at all, the interesting patterns are in longer-term aggregate trends. It's also always interesting to see that the systematic differences between different polls (probably because of wording, the order of questions, etc.) are far larger than the sample-size-determined "margin of error".