No port in a storm

Ishiba’s support stabilizes, but little sign that he is gaining from the crisis

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Polling data

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Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru (right) opens the World Expo in Osaka. Source: Prime Minister’s Office of Japan

The weekend yielded a series of new polls – Kyodo, NHK, the Mainichi Shimbun, and the Yomiuri Shimbun all conducted polls – that was notable mostly for revealing that the Ishiba government’s support has apparently stabilized, and even gained back some of the ground lost in net approval after the revelations in March of Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s gifts to first-term Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Diet members.

In my ten-day moving average of the Ishiba government’s approval ratings, the new polls bring the government’s weighted average approval to 29.5% and its disapproval to 55.7%, for a net approval of -26.2.

Adjusted for house effects, the picture is slightly more favorable, with average approval of 31.6% and disapproval of 53.9% for a -22.3 net approval.

However, the problem for Ishiba and the LDP is that while the crisis has arrested the government’s falling approval ratings, it has not translated into more robust support for either. The internals of these polls suggest not only has the US-Japan trade crisis not yielded more robust support for the government, but also more data points suggest that the public may be increasingly willing to consider a change of government.