It's A Fact: Terror Warnings = Higher Bush Approval Ratings

I just discovered something that lends credence to what many of us have anecdotally suspected: That there is a direct correlation between an increase in government terrorist warnings and jumps in President Bush's approval ratings.

Those were the findings of a Cornell University sociologist last fall.

Ph.D. candidate Robb Willer tracked the 26 times that a government agency increased the threat level for terrorist activity in the United States between February 2001 and May 2004 and mapped those instances to Gallup polls showing Bush's approval ratings during those periods.

The study was published in the September 2004 issue of Current Research in Social Psychology.

“Results showed that terror warnings increased presidential approval ratings consistently,” said Willer, who found that Bush's approval rating went up an average of almost three percentage points in the week following each terror warning.

Willer began his study after watching Bush's approval rating leap from 51 percent on September 10, 2001 to 86 percent five days later.

So Americans being scared means they like Bush more... Gee, do you think Karl Rove knows about this?