Bush's political comeback?

Every poll, save for the most recent one released by CBS, shows the President's approval rating rising slightly from its lows at around 31 percent.

Here is the progression of the Gallup poll from May 5th-7th until now, and it gives a decently accurate picture of upward progress for the administration over the past month.

May 5th-7th: 31 approve, 65 percent disapprove
May 8th-11th: 33 approve, 61 disapprove
June 1st-4th: 36 approve, 57 disapprove
June 9th-11th: 38 approve, 56 disapprove

This is just the Gallup poll but it does show un upward trend from May 5th through May 11th, and then after polling was resumed the ratings rose again. There was a net 7 percent increase in approve and a 9 point decrease in disapproval and that is something statistically significant.

The AP/Ipsos poll has been one of the most negative about the President for quite a while (not in terms of bias but in terms of approval rating), and even there his ratings did slightly rise, from 33 approve, 65 disapprove from May 1-3 to 35-63 approval/disapproval in their most recent poll. The only poll showing any sort of downward trend over that time period was the most recent CBS poll, showing Bush's approval rating dropping from 35 to 33 percent, and disapproval remaining static at 60 percent.

This is nowhere near where it needs to be for Bush to be anything but a major drag on Republicans up and down the ticket, which begs the question: Is any sort of political comeback for the President even possible? The major difficulty is that voters are very framiliar with him and their impressions are very hard to change. During the period after the 2000 election for example, the Bush strategists decided that the public views the President in very black-and-white terms and that 93 percent of people already knew how they were going to vote in 2004 immediately after the 2000 election. The campaign's strategy was based largely on winning the election in such a tightly contested climate and the President was reelected 51-48, as everyone knows. The polarization would serve to limit the extent of such a revival.

Perhaps the best the administration can do is lift the approval ratings above 40 percent to where they were during most of 2005 before Hurricane Katrina. However, even that would be a benefit in many marginal districts.