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Is Kamala Harris' approval rating "the lowest of any vice president"? I was watching this Fox News video and I am not sure if it's accurate or not.

Sources:

28% approval rating as of Nov 8, 2021

Harris hit an historic low approval rating of 28%, even lower than Dick Cheney's all-time worst.

Article cited in Fox News video

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    Even if assuming this claim is limited to Vice Presidents in the United States, it's unanswerable, because not all historical Vice Presidents of the United States have had their approval ratings measured. – gerrit Nov 09 '21 at 08:47
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    The 28% one seems to be an outlier relative to her recent polling https://www.latimes.com/projects/kamala-harris-approval-rating-polls-vs-biden-other-vps/ So unless she recently did something terrible I haven't heard of, the question is premised on somewhat dubious data to begin with. – the gods from engineering Nov 09 '21 at 10:03
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    @Fizz The group that conducted the poll, Suffolk University, ranks as a B+ per FiveThirtyEight.com with regard to predictability. That's a fairly good (but not great) rating. What might make this a bit of an outlier is when the poll was conducted, which was the Wednesday to Friday immediately following the 2021 off-year election. That was an election in which Democrats underperformed (and that's putting it nicely). – David Hammen Nov 09 '21 at 12:24
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    @gerrit: If their approval rating wasn't measured (as would have been the case before modern polling), then obviously they're ignored, since approval ratings can only be compared if they exist. – jamesqf Nov 09 '21 at 16:38
  • Related: Poll tracker for Kamala Harris at FiveThirtyEight. – Nat Nov 09 '21 at 17:36
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    @gerrit You don't need the ratings of all VPs to definitively answer the question - a single instance of a VP with a lower rating means the answer is "no", regardless of how many VPs there are with unknown approval ratings. Only in the case where Harris' rating was actually the lowest among all measured VPs would the answer be unknown, but it seems that's not the case - there are VPs who had lower approval, so Harris' is not the lowest. Unknown approval ratings for early VPs make no difference. – Nuclear Hoagie Nov 09 '21 at 18:07
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    @NuclearHoagie That's true, of course. I should have written that it can not be positively confirmed. – gerrit Nov 09 '21 at 19:40
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    This seems like a rather pointless nitpick. Of course it is implied in the question that we're talking about VPs who have had approval ratings. – JBentley Nov 10 '21 at 15:02
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    @gerrit The linked sources say "any modern VP" – Azor Ahai -him- Nov 10 '21 at 16:02
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    A big welcome to visitors from the Hot Network Questions!

    Just a reminder that here we don't care about your political views - stick to the facts. Also, we don't need any pseudo-answers in the comments. Thanks!

     – Oddthinking Nov 10 '21 at 22:43
  • @gerrit Every single vice president of the United States has had their approval measured in some way. The question is ambiguous in which metrics are supported. I will take advantage of that ambiguity to say that VP Harris is simultaneously the most popular and most unpopular of all US VPs. – emory Nov 12 '21 at 03:32

1 Answers1

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As has been pointed out, the 28% is an outlier. The average poll still has her at around 41%.

If we look at that 41% value, she is still above past vice presidents. Mike Pence eg polled at times around 38% (the list also contains polls from before and after he was VP, so the <30% values are not relevant for this question).

But even if we take the outlier 28%, we can find other outliers that go below that. Dick Cheney regularly polled around 30% (see eg these 29% and 30% polls), and a CBS-New York Times poll found a "favorable" rating of Cheney of just 23% (which at one time even went as low as 13%).

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    Might be an over-statement to call it an "extreme" outlier; it's more of a normal outlier. In-context, also worth noting that the poll was conducted from 2021-11-03 through 2021-11-05, in the wake of the elections on 2021-11-02, which may've affected sentiment, rather than the deviation merely being a statistical fluke. – Nat Nov 09 '21 at 17:56
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    Good answer. I'm wondering how accurate these polls are. After all US pollsters were quite inaccurate when it comes to two last presidential election (Then again, I can't really think better sources.) – pinegulf Nov 10 '21 at 06:29
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    @pinegulf: My understanding is that when modern opinion polls do a poor job of predicting election results, it's not usually so much that they do a poor job of determining how many people prefer each candidate, as that they do a poor job of predicting which people will actually vote. Approval ratings don't have to worry about that, because everyone's opinion is considered equally relevant. – ruakh Nov 10 '21 at 08:02
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    @pinegulf honestly, I don't trust any kind of polls by default. There is A LOT of manipulation that can be done from sampling to data analysis and, of course, they never divulge the relevant markers that someone could use to identify it – Juliana Karasawa Souza Nov 10 '21 at 08:07
  • @Nat I took the word "extreme" to mean "on the extremes" rather than "rather unusual." So more that this was one of the lowest outliers she's had. – trlkly Nov 10 '21 at 09:48
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    Regarding statistical outliers: https://xkcd.com/882/ which I think applies here. – hlovdal Nov 12 '21 at 14:03
  • the Dick Cheney 13% is NOT the same question: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20090118_poll_results.pdf vs https://www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suffolk/documents/academics/research-at-suffolk/suprc/polls/national/2021/11_10_2021_tables.pdf In the Cheney poll, they were given an additional option besides 'undecided' of 'haven't heard enough yet' – thelawnet Nov 21 '21 at 12:40