Democrats hold onto their double-digit lead in the House, even with Donald Trump’s approval rating advancing to its second-highest in his career in our most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, picked up by The New York Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg, New Zealand Herald, and The Salt Lake Tribune, among others. Also in our mid-October poll, the public by 51-41 percent disapproves of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, with additional coverage on this topic by Politico, USA Today, The Hill (here and here), Axios, MSNBC, and Newsweek.

We’ve been taking a closer look at the relationship between the economy and presidential approval.

President Trump is the first president whose approval ratings have consistently lagged those of the economy, as measured by the national economy gauge of the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index. For more details, check out the Bloomberg article There’s never been a president this unpopular with an economy this good, with calculations provided by Langer Research Associates.

Further, Gary Langer re-examines the “Carville Dictum” in his new op-ed Presidential approval: It’s the economy; except when it’s not published in The Hill earlier this week, with contributions by research associate Allison De Jong.

Full results from the Phi Delta Kappa Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools were released this month, covering topics such as teacher pay, school funding, perceived opportunity gaps between different student groups, the value of a college degree and its affordability, and other issues facing the public schools more broadly.
The most notable results include:

• Overwhelming support for increasing teacher pay, with 73 percent of Americans saying they would support the teachers in their community if they were to go on strike for higher salaries.
• A preference for spending more on students who need extra support rather than the same amount on each student regardless of need, 60 vs. 39 percent, albeit with no consensus on where the extra funds should come from.
• Widespread perception of fewer educational opportunities for lower-income, rural and black and Hispanic students  when compared with their counterparts.

Formerly the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, it’s now the third year the PDK survey has been produced by Langer Research Associates. See media coverage by the American Federation of Teachers, the National School Boards Association, The Washington Post, Townhall, The Guardian, NEA Today, the Chicago Daily Herald, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Boston Herald, the Arizona Education News Service, and Diverse: Issues in Education.
In addition to the full report, results from the 2018 PDK survey on school security were part of a separate, early release in July. It’s been picked up by USA Today, Politico, The Washington Post, The Hill, the Chicago Daily Herald, Detroit News, the Orlando Sentinel, The Buffalo News, The Crime Report, and The Jerusalem Post, among others.

The Democrats’ midterm advantage rose to its widest since 2006 in our late-August ABC News/Washington Post poll, with coverage by CNN, NBC News, Bloomberg, Politico, The Hill, Vox, Fortune, Business Insider, and The Boston Globe, among others. That same poll found Americans split on Bret Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, with additional media coverage on this topic by CNN, HuffPost, The Hill, Time, Newsweek, and MarketWatch.

Disapproval of President Trump is at a new high in our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, with the public showing broad support for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and half supporting initiating impeachment proceedings against the president. The poll has received wide coverage beyond ABC and the Post, including by CNN, CBS News, CNBC, Bloomberg, Politico, Newsweek (here and here), USA Today, The Hill, Fortune, Business Insider, Vice News, Salon, the Independent, New York Daily News, The Washington Times, and the Chicago Tribune, among others.

We recently polled on reactions to Donald Trump’s statements on U.S. intelligence findings related to Russian election interference, following a widely-discussed press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Our survey got wide pickup from a variety of news outlets, including The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Weekly Standard, the Daily Mail, Roll Call, the East Bay Times and The Record, among others.

Among our recently released work:

• An early release from the 2018 Phi Delta Kappa poll on school security covering parents’ concerns and preferences when it comes to keeping their children safe at school. There’s consensus on some measures – like stationing armed police in the schools, providing mental health screenings and using metal detectors – but significantly less support for arming teachers and staff. That said, if a rigorous training program were implemented, putting guns in the hands of teachers gains in popularity. Full results of the poll – which covers K-12 issues ranging from inequity of opportunity to college affordability – will be released in September.
• A survey on Americans’ attitudes toward global warming and related topics, with researchers from Stanford’s Political Psychology Research Group and Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research institution working to improve environmental decision-making. Awareness of the issue is up, and support for action – including making the cuts called for in the Paris agreement rejected by Donald Trump – is broad. But the public has significant concerns about whether government action can reduce global warming and questions the urgency of the problem.
• Our paper on using MRP to predict the 2016 election has been officially published online by Public Opinion Quarterly for print release in the next issue. Our models, developed over the course of the campaign, successfully predicted the outcome in nearly all states using cumulative data from our ABC News/Washington Post polls.

It’s been a busy spring for Langer Research Associates. Among other projects, we’re managing U.S. and Canada surveys for the latest round of the Pew Global Attitudes Project; launched a survey on education technology for Digital Promise, the ed tech nonprofit created by an act of Congress; designed and fielded the 50^th annual PDK Poll on public attitudes toward public education; and carried out ongoing research on sleep health for the National Sleep Foundation, among other research projects.

We presented two papers at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Denver in May. Research Analyst Christine Filer presented on measuring work-related sexual harassment, and Research Analyst Sofi Sinozich gave a paper on the 49^th annual PDK poll.

Gary Langer has a chapter on probability vs. non-probability methods in the newly published Palgrave Handbook of Survey Research, and our paper on using MRP in state-level election forecasting, by Chad Kiewiet de Jonge, Gary and Sofi, will appear in a forthcoming edition of Public Opinion Quarterly. These follow pieces based on our work in the past year published in Sleep Health and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Our April ABC News/Washington Post poll covered topics ranging from Robert Mueller’s investigation to North Korean denuclearization, with pickup from outlets such as CNN (here and here), The Hill, Politico, Vox, Talking Points Memo, Roll Call, Slate, Mic and the Washington Examiner, among others.

Following the tragedy in Parkland, Fla., our most recent ABC/Washington Post poll found that most Americans think neither Donald Trump nor Congress is doing enough to prevent mass shootings. This and other results from our newest poll were picked up by CNN, CBS News, Politico, The Hill, Slate, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Salon, Newsmax, the Los Angeles Times, and The Mercury News, among others.