No, virtually nobody would regret voting for him but approve of the job he's doing. But there's probably a few people who don't approve of the job he's doing, but when considering the alternative do not actually regret voting for him. Those people will make the "approval" numbers lower than the "don't regret" numbers.
And that is the category that I fell into-- which I don't think is probably statistically significant. Most polling questions are but gathering gut reactions.
There are several people in this thread alone that said they don't regret voting for him because they remember the alternative. That means they may or may not approve of what he's doing, but it's still better than the other option in their mind. It seems if the goal was to make the comparison with the national approval ratings, you'd have simply posted a poll with the following options: voted for him, approve voted for him, don't approve didn't vote for him, approve didn't vote for him, disapprove (or, if you wanted to break it down further, you could add dem/ind/rep to each of the choices)
That was not the goal. The goal was largely accomplished: to see how Obama voters felt about his first year in office, i.e. would they vote for him again. Some call it approval; some do not. When I wrote the poll I wasn't thinking about the reality of the choices at the time of election; I was just thinking about current level of satisfaction. I guess I just should have called it approval rather than regret.
I don't follow your conclusion; can you explain further? My thread was about Obama voters level of satisfaction. The other was about relative levels of informedness about general issues. It contravened the DailyHOC's assertions that Republicans are mostly idiots. According to that poll, those idiots outperformed Democrats.... although no one's performance was outstanding.
Yeah, you messed up there. Your thread basically came out to asking folks that voted for Obama "do you think Obama/Biden have performed, and will continue to perform, worse than you would have expected of McCain/Palin?"
I guess that shows you how tough polling is. I never thought about all the layers of meaning that would go onto what seemed to be a simple, straight-forward question.
I was a Clinton supporter in the primaries and a reluctant Obama supporter in the general but I don't regret voting for Obama. Also I think between Obama, Clinton and McCain I think overall things wouldn't be that difference outside of health care and even then I think McCain would be pushing some sort of health care bill since it was such a big issue. Things like the stimulus package, GM bailout, Afghanistan surge I think all three of the candidates would've handled them relatively similar.
