The Cheney approval fallacy

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has been in a war of words with Vice President Cheney over his statement that the war in Iraq is "lost," recently made this crack:

Mr. Reid said he was not going to engage in a tit-for-tat with the vice president. "I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating," he said.

This is a classic example of the Cheney disapproval fallacy in which Democrats overestimate how unpopular Cheney is. The most recent poll (Time 3/23-3/26) shows Cheney with a 32 percent approval rating, which is indistinguishable from Bush's rating in the same poll of 33 percent. To be sure, those are bad numbers, but Cheney isn't any more unpopular than Bush.

Update 4/25 12:36 PM: Mark Blumenthal makes a similar point at Pollster.com.

Update 4/27 7:44 AM: Charles Franklin plots Cheney approval and disapproval on his Political Arithmetik blog, showing that Cheney's numbers track Bush's closely.

Comments

[talboito]

And this post is a classic example of the "Brendan Nyhan unable to get a joke" fallacy...