Polls point to fluid upper house campaign

The government loses ground as the campaign draws near

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Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru discusses the LDP’s upper house campaign with the secretaries general of the LDP’s prefectural chapters. Source: LDP

The Ishiba government continues to cede some of the ground it recovered in opinion polls after Koizumi Shinjirō joined in the government in May. A new round of opinion polls conducted over the weekend by NHK, the Yomiuri Shimbun, Nikkei Shimbun, and the Mainichi Shimbun saw the government’s moving average approval drop back to roughly 30% and its average disapproval climb back above 50%; after dipping under -13 in mid-June, its net approval is once again above -23. The numbers look only slightly better when adjusting for pollster biases, with net approval of -20.8. (Polling data and more information about my methodology is available here.)