Downward trend for Bush, Iraq war

Regular readers know I put very little stock in public polls of the sort done by Strategic Vision, the Atlanta-based, Republican firm that insists it polls in Wisconsin all the time just out of the goodness of its heart, with no one paying for it.

Mark Green's campaign trumpeted the latest numbers which showed Green 1% ahead, up from 2% behind. Statistically, there's no difference. Both polls are a dead heat, within the margin of error. And both polls are very different from results other recent polls by reputable national firms, which show Doyle with a significant lead because Green is still unknown to half of the voters in Wisconsin. Those polls, done by campaigns or interest groups for strategic reasons, aren't public. (You'll notice the Green campaign, which obviously does its own polling, hasn't shared any results. There's a reason for that; Green still trails by quite bit.)

In any event, what is interesting to look at in these polls are the trends. No matter how badly they might choose the sample or conduct the interviews, if they do them the same way every time you can measure movement and trends over the course of several polls.

And those trends are very bad for George Bush and the war in Iraq, as Cory Liebmann's analysis demonstrates. If I were Mark Green, I'd pretend I'd never been in Congress and never heard of the Victory in Iraq caucus, whether Al-Zarqawi is dead or alive.