Nobel Prize Fails to Impress

Scott Rasmussen finds that Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize has had zero impact on Americans’ view of his performance in office: his overall approval rating among likely voters stood at 49% before the award, and 49% after. Rasmussen does find an uptick in voter intensity, with “strong approval” up three points and “strong disapproval” up five, but I’d guess that’s mostly random variation. If these changes are meaningful, they suggest that the ridicule hurt Obama more than the Nobel committee’s praise helped him.
Here is Obama’s “approval index,” the net of strong approval vs. strong disapproval, from his inauguration to the present. The index has been quite stable since “disapprovers” began to outnumber “approvers” during the summer: