Senator Approval Rankings Methodology (September 2016)

More than 71,900 registered voters across America have evaluated the job performance of key elected officials on Morning Consult’s weekly online national polling from early May 2016 through early September 2016 to determine the latest Senator Approval Rankings. This memo describes these data collection efforts.

On each poll, Americans indicated whether they approved or disapproved of the job performance of President Barack Obama, their state Governor, both of their U.S. Senators, their Member of Congress and their mayor (if they lived in a city with more than about 10,000 residents). For each question, they could answer strongly approve, somewhat approve, somewhat disapprove, strongly disapprove, or don’t know / no opinion.

Morning Consult obtained an up-to-date list of Governors, U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives from Sunlight Foundation’s Congress API v3 and Open States API and obtained a list of mayors from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Survey respondents were assigned to their appropriate Governor and both U.S. Senators based on their state of residence, assigned to their Member of Congress based on a combination of zip code, IP address, latitude and longitude, and assigned to their mayor based on their state and zip code.

We obtained population parameters for registered voters from the November 2012 Current Population Survey (CPS). We applied post-stratification weights based on gender, age, educational attainment and race. Thus far, the median state includes a total of 1096 respondents, the state with the most respondents is California (n = 56,284) and the state with the least respondents is Wyoming (n = 127).

Morning Consult