Last month, Gallup generated a great deal of attention for a startling finding: During the month of October, President Joe Biden’s approval rating apparently tumbled 11 points among Democrats — his core constituency.

Presumably based on conventional wisdom, but no actual evidence, Gallup attributed that drop to opponents of the president’s support for Israel in the wake of Hamas’s murderous Oct. 7 attack.

However, although it elicited no attention, come to find that Gallup’s polling in November recorded an 8-point jump in the president’s approval among Democrats, nearly reversing the October fall.

So much for Gallup’s initial explanation. It's hard to argue that Biden’s support for Israel hurt him in the immediate aftermath of the attack but is now helping him.

Moreover, it’s clear the October measurement was a statistical outlier. From January through September this year, the president sported an average 84 percent approval rating from fellow Democrats. In October, the reading was 75 percent, and then in November it was back within a point of the average, at 83 percent.

The “drop” to 75 percent was most likely noise,........

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