American presidents typically receive a bump when the country is considering entering a war or in the early stages of war. It's when the conflicts create numerous deaths or last forever with no stated purpose that the polls will turn negative.

I was grappling with this down thread.

however, I might misunderstand the remark and think the comment was about "lice between my ears" instead.

Do you think because it is August? The HC bill failed (Voters can give the president credit). No smoking Russian gun yet? I can't think of any reason for his numbers to be up. I don't think this white supremacist stuff will help him.

Nate always relies on averaging, not immediacy

His bump probably would have been higher if he wasn't such an abject fucking failure as a leader.

In a hypothetical world where everyone's opinion of the President never changed one iota, polls would still show it moving all over the place day-to-day. The pattern would become clear only after zooming out and looking at the trend.

It is similar to flipping a coin 10 times and getting 6/10 heads, then trying again and getting 4/10 heads. You wouldn't conclude that the coin started out biased towards heads and then had its bias changed towards tails -- you would just conclude that it takes many more data points before an accurate picture starts to emerge.

Polls do sample hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, but that is a drop in the bucket in a country of over 300 million people. Increasing sample size is extremely expensive in a world where the response rate is 5-10%, and the marginal reduction in noise actually decreases the more sample size increases.

for months now there are around 25% who will always support him just like Bush.

The bar will be raised again once Democrats get into power.

His statement on Monday about Virginia were the real thing. That and North Korea probably gave him a goose.