Very astute comment, but IMO doesn't go far enough. What if one thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction because of pork-barrel politics, politicization of Supreme Court nominations, and lack of will to protect the country from further terrorist attacks? According to the interpretation presented here, and common elsewhere, a person who answers "wrong track" for those reasons is counted as "unfavorable" with respect to Bush. Most of those positions could be either bipartisan or blaming one party more than the other, and certainly the third would be less likely to come from a person who would prefer to see Ted Kennedy in charge.

While this poll may be in the mainstream in its choice of interpretive framework, it is precisely the use of the data to attempt to shape public opinion that leads over time to invalid data. Validity in this context means measuring what you intend to measure. When the data is collected in this fashion and overinterpreted, self-aware respondents will begin to answers pollsters strategically: They will not provide their true opinion if they know their response will be used to argue that "people" have some other opinion. They will answer in terms of the way they expect the data to be interpreted. Accurate measurement becomes impossible.

There was a heyday of powerful predictiveness in US opinion polls, but that day I believe may be past.