A bump for Bush?

Scott Rasmussen's automated poll has George W. Bush's job rating up sharply, from 44 percent on December 19—about where it's been lingering for months—to 50 percent on December 23. By itself this just might be taken for an outlier, but other polls have also showed a significant uptick in Bush's job rating. Mystery Pollster, inclined to regard the first of these upticks as an outlier, has now taken the view that Bush's numbers are up; compare his initial post and his updates. Both are models of intelligent and thoughtful poll interpretation, reading the numbers carefully as they come in.

Few if any polls are going to be taken over the Christmas week, so it looks like Bush will end the year with an uptick. But it's still far from clear that he can make some policy headway off it in 2006.