Gallup has examined the May approval ratings for the Post-World War II Presidents elected to their first term (which is pretty much all the Presidents for whom we have data, since Gallup didn't start measuring approval ratings until FDR's third term) and concludes:

So far in May, Barack Obama has averaged 65% job approval. Since World War II, only three of the previous eight presidents elected to their first terms -- Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan -- have had a higher average approval rating in May of their first year. Obama's average exceeds those of the three most recent presidents -- George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

The Atlantic piles on:

Analysts have likened Obama's '08 victory and massive popularity to Ronald Reagan's--saying Obama has ushered in an era of Democratic dominance akin to what Reagan did for the GOP. Given the relatively low ratings of presidents since Reagan, Gallup's data seem to support that--but we have to remember, it's only May of his first term.

Maybe.

Gallup is correct that only three other post-WWII Presidents elected to their first terms have had higher approval ratings in May.  But besides Obama, Ike, Kennedy and Reagan, there have been only five Presidents elected to their first terms since WWII.  One (Carter) had the exact same approval rating as Obama, and two had marginally lower ratings (Nixon at 63%, GHW Bush at 60%) and two had significantly lower ratings (Dubya at 55% and Clinton at 45%).  What we really have are two Presidents with sky-high approval ratings, two Presidents with mediocre-to-poor approval ratings, and four Presidents with approval ratings comparable to Obama's.  An equally valid interpretation of Gallup's data is "Obama's May Approval Ratings: Middle of the Pack."

As for the Reagan Revolution revisited theory, time will tell.  Reagan had solid approval ratings in May, yet his party suffered the sixth-worst midterm defeat in the post-war era eighteen months later.  Had the recession lasted a few months longer, we may have been looking back at Reagan as an accidental President.  Carter had approval ratings similar to Obama's, and yet he did not exactly re-invigorate liberalism.

Nor would I read too much into the fact that Obama beats out recent Presidents in their May approval ratings.  Bush II and Clinton both came to office with asterisks attached to their names.  Democrats believed that Bush stole the Presidency outright.  Clinton came to office with almost 60% of the country having voted for someone else, while Republicans believed that he had only won the Presidency because of Ross Perot and a pliant media that continued to hype a recession that had ended over a year earlier.

In other words, there's a reason that Bush II and Clinton's approval ratings softened so early -- a large number of people not only disliked them, but questioned the very legitimacy of their election.  But regardless of how Republican partisans feel about Obama, few question his basic legitimacy -- he was elected fair and square.  Given that, it isn't all that surprising that Obama's approval ratings are a reversion to the Post-WWII norm.  And given that it has been so long since we've had a President that the country accepted as legitimate off the bat, its no wonder that the press corps is in awe of his sustained approval ratings.

So I don't think there's anything we can read, either positive or negative, into the Obama's approval ratings right now.  He may well reshape the basic American political alignment, or he may march the Democrats to their doom.  It is far too early to tell.

As an aside, note Gallup's definition of its dataset: "May approval ratings for the Post-World War II Presidents elected to their first term."  There's a good reason for doing that to try to keep the apples compared only to the apples, but that definition does excludes three Presidents: Truman, LBJ, and Ford, who were not elected to their first term.  If we look at their approval ratings five months after they became President, Truman was at 75%, LBJ was at 77%, and Ford was at 37%.  If we look at their approvals five months after they were inaugurated to their first full term, Truman was at around 53%, and LBJ was at 70%.  So no matter how you define your dataset, Obama is still pretty much at the middle of the pack.

As a final aside, I think the Atlantic needs to step up its factchecking.  Note this in the article: "Unemployment was around 8 percent when Carter took office, and then continued to rise (up to 9 percent--around where it is now), but peaked early that year and declined for the rest of 1975. Carter remained popular despite the early rise, and then things started to turn around."  Note then that Carter was not, in fact, elected in 1974.  Nor was he in office in 1975, when unemployment spiked at 9%.  Unemployment was down to 7.5% when he took office -- 1.5% off of its peak -- and continued to decline until it bottomed out in early 1979.

Two polls released in the past two days find a plurality of Americans approve of the selection of Sonia Sotomayor to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. A plurality of Republicans, however, disapprove of the president's choice.

In the Quinnipiac survey released this morning, 54 percent said they approve of Sotomayor, while 24 percent disapprove and 22 percent are undecided. The poll was taken of 1,438 registered voters nationwide from May 26-28, with a margin of error of +/- 2.6 percentage points.

Worded slightly different and based on just one night of polling (Tuesday, when the announcement was made), Gallup found that 47 percent think Sotomayor was either a good or excellent choice. This survey was based on interviews with 1,015 adults with +/- 3 percentage-point margin of error.

Most important, Gallup respondents said, to President Obama was Sotomayor's 17 years on the federal bench (61 percent), followed closely by her intellect (59 percent). Two-thirds also said that being a woman and Hispanic were at least somewhat important considerations in Obama's choice.

The Quinnipiac poll found that 70 percent believe the fact that Sotomayor could become the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice was at least somewhat important to Obama's decision making process.

That survey also found voters to be split on what U.S. senators should consider when deciding whether to support her nomination: 47 percent said senators should only look at whether she is qualified to serve, while 43 percent said her views on controversial issues like abortion and affirmative action should be considered. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans said her views on those issues should count, 56 percent of Democrats said only qualifications should matter, and independents were split, favoring qualifications by 2 points.

(Cross-posted on RCP's Politics Nation)

On the heels of a Rasmussen poll showing him leading in the June 2 Republican primary, a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll out today finds New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie ahead of Gov. Jon Corzine (D) in a potential general election matchup (May 25-27, 600 LV, +/- 4%).

With 55% of voters holding an unfavorable opinion of Corzine, Christie holds a 46%-39% lead. Close to half of voters hold no opinion of Christie, while two-thirds don't know enough about his primary opponent, Steve Lonegan -- who leads Corzine by 3 points.

According to Rasmussen, United States Attorney Chris Christie is poised to defeat former Bogota mayor and conservative activist Steve Lonegan in Tuesday's New Jersey Republican primary. Christie leads Lonegan 46%-35%. In the general election, Christie has generally led incumbent Governor Jon Corzine in polling, while Lonegan has been tied with Corzine.

Christie currently leads Lonegan by 17.4 points in the latest RCP Average, and is over 50%. Primaries are tricky to poll, but it looks as thought Christie will earn the right to face off with Corzine in the November election.

Andrew Cline misses the mark with his essay this morning by asking, What If Sotomayor Were White?

Take everything that is known about Sonia Sotomayor and change three factors -- her race, sex, and family's initial socioeconomic status -- and the points cited in praise of her selection would be diminished by more than 50 percent. The complimentary commentary would be reduced to: Mr. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and has had a breadth of experience over his lengthy legal career. That's it.

First, I'd argue that high marks from Princeton and Yale Law and a lengthy legal career would be enough to qualify her for the Supreme Court. But Kline also misses the fact that she has a compelling personal story which, like it or not, is part and parcel of the selling of a Supreme Court Justice in the modern era.

The dividing line here isn't race, and it isn't gender. It's partisanship. The better question is: what kind of treatment would Sotomayor receive if she were a Republican? It doesn't require too much imagination, since just a couple of years ago we saw the way the Democrats in the Senate treated a very well qualified Hispanic nominee with his own compelling up-from-the-bootstraps story.

Democrats went out of their way to block Miguel Estrada from being put on a track (the DC Circuit)  to even have a future shot at the Supreme Court, with Dick Durbin going out of his way to mention Estrada's ethnicity in an email as a reason for the Democrats to stonewall his nomination.

The bottom line is that both sides play identity politics when they can. It's just that Democrats are a lot better at getting away with it than Republicans.

A Quinnipiac poll released this morning finds Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (D) leading Republican Pat Toomey by 9 points and potential intra-party challenger Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) by 29 points (May 20-26, 1191 RV, +/- 2.8%).

Sestak said yesterday that he intends to challenge Specter, who switched to the Democratic Party one month ago today. Forty-six percent hold a favorable opinion of Specter, while 61% don't know enough about Toomey to have any opinion of him.

"Sen. Arlen Specter's numbers have slipped since the controversy that followed his switch to the Democratic Party, but he's still better off than he would have been if he stayed a Republican and faced a tough primary challenge from former Rep. Pat Toomey,” said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

For the GOP nomination, Toomey leads Rep. Jim Gerlach and Peg Luksik by a wide margin.

General Election
Specter 46 (-7 vs. last poll, May 4)
Toomey 37 (+4)
Und 14 (+4)

Sestak 37
Toomey 35
Und 23

Dem Primary
Specter 50
Sestak 21
Und 27

GOP Primary
Toomey 38
Gerlach 10
Luksik 3
Und 47

Ron Brownstein in 2004:

In this month's election, President Bush carried 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them "exurban" communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas.

Together, these fast-growing communities provided Bush a punishing 1.72 million vote advantage over Democrat John F. Kerry, according to a Times analysis of election results. That was almost half the president's total margin of victory.

"These exurban counties are the new Republican areas, and they will become increasingly important to Republican candidates," said Terry Nelson, the political director for Bush's reelection campaign. "This is where a lot of our vote is."

These growing areas, filled largely with younger families fleeing urban centers in search of affordable homes, are providing the GOP a foothold in blue Democratic-leaning states and solidifying the party's control over red Republican-leaning states.

They also represent a compounding asset whose value for the Republican Party has increased with each election: Bush's edge in these 100 counties was almost four times greater than the advantage they provided Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee eight years ago.

In states like Ohio, Minnesota and Virginia, Republican strength in these outer suburbs is offsetting Democratic gains over the last decade in more established -- and often more affluent -- inner-tier suburbs. As Democrats analyze a demoralizing defeat in this month's presidential election, one key question they face is whether they can reduce the expanding Republican advantage on the new frontier between suburbs and countryside.

"When any party is losing a growing group of voters, that's a problem -- and this is a group where support for Democrats is diminishing as the size of the group grows," said Mark Mellman, Kerry's campaign pollster.

Ron Brownstein in 2009:

These intertwined trends—the Republican Party's growing reliance on the South and the erosion of its strength elsewhere, particularly along the coasts—have prompted some unusually public soul-searching within the GOP about whether the party has grown too defined by the unflinchingly conservative priorities of its most loyal region. Although the GOP congressional leadership includes more non-Southerners than it did in the 1990s, much of the party's most militant opposition to President Obama has come from Southern leaders, such as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The Texan even raised the possibility of secession in response to Obama's initiatives.

In the view of former Rep. Charles Bass, R-N.H., who was defeated in 2006, “The current crisis of the Republican Party is whether it wants to be a regional party or whether it can try to expand ideologically and appeal to other regions.”

Although not as severe, the regional challenges now confronting the GOP resemble those that Democrats faced in the first decades of the 20th century, when Republicans dominated Congress and the White House. From 1896 until Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, the Solid South, which still rejected Republicans as the perpetrators of “Northern aggression” in the Civil War, provided the sole regional base for the depleted Democrats. But throughout much of that period, the Democrats' pervasive identification with the South made it harder for them to loosen the Republicans' commanding grip on the rest of the country. In those years of Democratic decline, “the South was the majority faction in a minority party,” notes Emory University political scientist Merle Black, co-author of the 2002 book The Rise of Southern Republicans. “And now it looks like the Southerners are becoming close to a majority faction in a minority Republican Party.”

So in four years Republicans have gone from a party with a solid red base that was threatening to foist a mortal wound upon the Democrats by obtaining a foothold in traditionally blue territory, to a party that should worry about being left with a base of Mississippi and Alabama.

Maybe, I guess.

The most striking thing about the 2008 election, however, is that for all the noise and hullabaloo about it being a realignment, there was very little evidence to support such a claim.

Consider the following map. It demonstrates the relative change of the parties' standing from 2004 to 2008. In other words: Barack Obama performed five points better than John Kerry nationwide. A state that moved a little more than that toward the Democrats -- 7-8 points -- is colored light blue, while a 8-9 point shift is coded a shade darker blue, and so forth. Likewise, a state that only moved 1-2 points toward Obama is shaded light red, and so forth:

We see very little movement here. Only eight states moved more than 5 points off the national average, while fully 31 states moved 2 points or less than did the national average. The red/blue map of 2004 is very much alive today; it is just covered up by a national shift toward the Democrats.

Now compare this to a year that is commonly accepted to be a re-aligning year. Here, we'll use 1888 through 1896, because a substantial third party effort makes a 1892 to 1896 comparison impossible:

Note the dramatic shifts. The South (Georgia is a curious exception) and West move sharply toward the Democrats. The Northeast, horrified by Bryan's inflationary politics, move toward the Republicans, wiping out what had been a strong Democratic minority in the region. Only eight states moved within two points of the national average. 21 states (at that time a majority) moved more than five points from the national average.

This is what a re-aligning election looks like (to the extent re-alignments exist). 2008 doesn't much look like 1896. Instead 2008 looks like an election where the country, dissatisfied with the Republicans, moved together toward the other party. The South moved as well, and moved about as much toward the Democrats as did other areas of the country. Since the GOP was stronger in the South to begin with, it maintained its base there, while losing swing areas and getting obliterated in areas where the Democrats had the upper hand. This is something of the inverse of 1984, where Republicans swept the floor everywhere -- but where no one would have called Massachusetts "purple" even though it had gone for Republicans twice in a row.

Politics has ebbs and flows, and when a party's President starts two wars that don't go well, oversees a collapse in the economy unlike any the country has seen since the late 1920s, and is photographed taking a guitar lesson while a major city is destroyed by a hurricane, his party tends to perform poorly in the subsequent election. Quite frankly, this should have been an absolute blowout election on the order of 1920 or 1952; its amazing the Republicans were able to keep it within single digits.

Finally, any analysis of the GOP's tradeoff of the Northeast for the South needs to consider the following: from 1952-2012, the South will have gone from 128 to 159 electoral votes. During that same time, New England will have fallen from 40 to 33, and NE+NY+PA from 117 electoral votes to 83. Even adding California and Illinois to the Dems' base doesn't raise them to parity.

To put it differently, in 1952, NY and PA combined for about as many votes as the entire South combined less TX, GA and NC. In 2012, the deep south (AR, MS, LA, AL, SC) will have more EVs than all of New England, and TX, FL, and GA will have as many EV's as NE+NY+PA. In other words, trading the South for the North wasn't a half-bad trade for the GOP, especially since demographic shifts in New England had begun weakening the GOP's hold in the Northeast during the early 1900s.

Via TPM.

The possibility that Specter's primary switch could lead him to still lose his primary has to be giving conservatives a serious case of schadenfreude. No polling yet on the Specter-Sestak matchup, but I'd expect some in the next few days. On the other hand, this probably pushes Specter to the left for the remainder of the term, which means that more of Obama's agenda becomes a reality.

Sestak's district is a swing district (D+3), so it opens up an opportunity for the Republicans, especially if recruiting is strong and things begin to go south for the Democrats.

Earlier this month, the New York Times profiled how Norway took the proceeds from its oil business and plowed it into savings. As the global economy contracted last year, Norway enjoyed economic growth of just under 3 percent. This year, they're running an 11 percent budget surplus and have one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world.

Today, the Wall Street Journal takes note of how Chile did much the same thing with their copper wealth. Holding out against intense protests, Chile's finance minister Andrés Velasco built a multi-billion dollar "rainy day fund" which has been used to stabilize the Chilean economy during the downturn.

The contrast with the U.S. is stark. In 2000, we were running a surplus. Today, after a bi-partisan binge, we're extraordinarily deep in the red. Such fiscal irresponsibility has eroded the fundamental basis of American power: the economy. Nor have we helped matters by engaging in two open-ended, extremely costly, nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the examples of Chile and Norway prove - this wasn't inevitable. In both instances, democratically elected leadership held out against the natural tide of public opinion (which is to demand money be spent) and positioned their nations to better weather the economic storm now raging.

(Cross-posted at RCW's The Compass.)