Barack Obama has suffered the worst third quarter decline in his public approval rating of any elected president in the post-World War II era.
Obama's average quarterly approval rating has slipped from 62 percent in the second quarter to 52.9 percent in the third quarter, according to Gallup polling. That 9 percentage point decline is twice the amount of any other post-war elected president. No other elected president has declined more than 4 points since 1953. The third quarter began July 20 and ended October 19.
Harry Truman, who of course inherited the presidency from FDR, dropped 13 points between his second and third quarters in 1945 and 1946.
Significantly, Obama's plunge in the polls is notable but not new news. Obama suffered the bulk of his decline in late summer, though the media was slow to notice or note. Since summer, Obama has stabilized and generally bobbed slightly above the 50 percent mark. However, Gallup's latest tracking poll shows Obama right at 50 percent. That matches the lowest ranking of his still-young presidency. Rasmussen also tracks Obama near his previous floor.
Among all presidents since WWII, Obama's third quarter approval rating is above only Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford. Clinton averaged 48 percent in the third quarter of 1993. Ford averaged 39 percent during his 1975 third quarter.
More sobering for Obama, Gallup reports that Obama's latest quarterly average ranks 144th, or in the 44th percentile, for all post-war presidents during any quarter.
Not that it matters politically because obviously she's a female Republican dunce and he's a male Democrat genius.
But Sarah Palin's poll numbers are strengthening.
And Barack Obama's are sliding.
Guess what? They're about to meet in the 40's.
Depending, of course, on which recent set of numbers you peruse and how the questions are phrased, 307 days into his allotted 1,461 the 44th president's approval rating among Americans has slid to 49% or 48%, showing no popularity bounce from his many happy trips, foreign and domestic. Virginia line for Sarah Palin Going Rogue Book buyers
Riding the wave of immense publicity and symbiotic media interest over her new book, "Going Rogue," and the accompanying promotional tour, Palin's favorable ratings are now at 43%, according to ABC. That's up from 40% in July.
One poll even gives her a 47% favorable.
Most recent media attention has focussed on the 60% who say she's unqualified to become president. Her unfavorable rating is 52%, down from 53%, which still doesn't ignite a lot of optimism for Palin-lovers.
On the other hand, 35 months before the 2008 election, that Illinois state senator was such a nobody that no one even thought to ask such a question about him. Things seem to change much more quickly these days.
Saturday night Palin's book bus swung by a mall in Roanoke, Va., a state Obama won a year ago but just recently elected a Republican governor to replace departing Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The former Alaska governor wanted to greet the hundreds of fans already lining up in 39-degree weather for her Sunday morning signing.
"She brings out a different crowd, " Salem Republican Party Chairman Greg Habeeb told the Roanoke Times. Habeeb was struck by the numerous non-Republicans he spotted in the line snaking all over the mall. "She taps into something that the Republican Party really needs to tap into."
Sunday Palin flew ahead of her bus to visit the Rev. Billy Graham and his son Franklin at the father's North Carolina home before her appearance today at Fort Bragg.
Overall, Palin's, well, campaign will visit 25 states, most of them politically crucial. Florida gets the most stops, three.
Everybody thinks 2012 when they think of Palin, who last week pushed Oprah's show to.... ... its highest ratings in nearly three years. Remember, though, in 2012 the first hurdles a rehabbed candidate Palin would face are her own party's primaries, where diligent conservatives conscientiously come out to play. Sarah Palin Going Rogue Book Cover
If she somehow mobilized Iowa's white evangelicals as Mike Huckabee did to win the 2008 season-opening caucus, many bets would be off about her unelectability. Right now, Palin holds 65% approval among white evangelical Protestants, not a bad place to start, if she decides to.
That same ABC poll finds Palin's GOP approval right around 76%, 45% among independents and a surprisingly substantial 21% among Democrats. Among self-described liberals she's seen favorably by a slightly larger 22%, among moderates 38% and among conservatives 60%.
Anyway, Palin says 2012's not on her radar. Which is a good idea. The year 2010 is much more important for both of these political personalities.
No longer holding any office and personally set financially by the book's runaway success, Palin can devote her SarahPac and the entire year to collecting chits from local Republicans.
As Mitt Romney has already been quietly doing. Other Republicans will no doubt nominate themselves to join along the way, especially if Obama looks vulnerable after November 2010.
Although presidential incumbency has hardly kept Obama chained to the Oval Office, he and Joe Biden now own the U.S. economy, where their much-vaunted $787 billion economic stimulus package has so far stimulated unemployment to grow by a quarter from 8% to more than 10%. Democrat president Barack Obama walks alone on China's Great Wall on 11-18-09
And then there's the growing deficit dread and the mounting costs -- both human and financial -- in the increasingly unpopular Afghan conflict, where Obama is about to commit more U.S. troops at the end of the eighth and worst casualty year of the war.
We'll all hear much next year about how jobs are the last thing to improve in a sour economy, even in congressional districts that don't actually exist. Which is too bad for Democrats because jobs are the obvious first measure the public uses to measure the economy.
Historically, the White House party loses about 17 House seats in a normal midterm election cycle. That wouldn't change control of the House.
George W. Bush's GOP actually gained seats in 2002. Democrat Bill Clinton's first midterm election was a political Katrina, producing the Contract with America and so-called Republican Revolution that saw the GOP take control of both houses of Congress after years of minority status.
Much of that turnaround was attributed to Clinton having run in 1992 as a centrist and then immediately pushed a more liberal agenda involving something called healthcare reform.
But that couldn't possibly happen again because of the popularity of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi whose current favorable poll ratings are -- let's see here -- OMG, only about half of Palin's.
This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.
From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man." They once held "an unromantically high opinion of Obama," and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn't "the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought."
She scored "the Chicago crowd," which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."
As I read Ms. Drew's piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, "Well, I was for Hillary." This in turn reminded me of a surprising thing I observe among loyal Democrats in informal settings and conversations: No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they're not dazzled and head over heels. That's gone away. He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support. But presidents need that rock—bottom 20% who, no matter what's happening—war, unemployment—adore their guy, have complete faith in him, and insist that you love him, too.
They're the hard 20 a president always keeps. Nixon kept them! Obama probably has a hard 20 too, but whatever is keeping them close, it doesn't seem to be love. ***
Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president's Asia trip suggested "a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power." The president's Afghanistan review has been "inexcusably clumsy," Mideast negotiations have been "fumbling." So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it "as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs."
He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama "seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably"—he should begin to bow to "the voices of experience" in Washington.
When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.
It also raises a distressing question: Who are the wise men and women now? Who are the Robert Lovetts, Chip Bohlens and Robert Strausses who can came in to help a president in trouble right his ship? America seems short of wise men, or short on those who are universally agreed to be wise. I suppose Vietnam was the end of that, but establishments exist for a reason, and it is hard for a great nation to function without the presence of a group of "the oldest and wisest" who can not only give sound advice but help engineer how that advice will be reported and received. ***
Mr Obama is in a hard place. Health care hangs over him, and if he is lucky he will lose a close vote in the Senate. The common wisdom that he can't afford to lose is exactly wrong—he can't afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation. He needs to get the issue behind him, vow to fight another day, and move on. Afghanistan hangs over him, threatening the unity of his own Democratic congressional base. There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama's rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demand baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.
Which gets us back to the bow.
In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn't that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He'd been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.
But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford's policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren't playing off a growing perception. If the pictures had been accompanied by headlines from Asia saying "Tough Talks Yield Big Progress" or "Obama Shows Muscle in China," the bowing pictures might be understood this way: "He Stoops to Conquer: Canny Obama shows elaborate deference while he subtly, toughly, quietly advances his nation's interests."
But that's not how the pictures were received or will be remembered.
It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.
It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through '08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you're stupid doesn't mean you're Lincoln.
One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we've got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don't worry.
But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.
President Obama's job approval rating has fallen to 47 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the lowest ever recorded for any president at this point in his term.
Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and even Richard Nixon all had higher approval ratings 10-and-a-half months into their presidencies. Obama's immediate predecessor, President George W. Bush, had an approval rating of 86 percent, or 39 points higher than Obama at this stage.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said he doesn't "put a lot of stock" in the survey by Gallup, which has conducted presidential approval polls since 1938, longer than any other organization.
"If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I'd visit my doctor," Gibbs said in response to questions from Fox. "I'm sure a six-year-old with a Crayon could do something not unlike that. I don't put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is daily Gallup trend. I don't pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it."
It’s not unusual for politicians to react to polls. I’ve certainly seen it many times over the years, particularly when elected representatives or candidates are confronted with poll results they don’t like.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked Tuesday about Gallup Daily poll results showing a drop in President Obama’s job approval rating. According to news reports, Gibbs responded with some critical remarks and unusual analogies.
I’m certain Gibbs didn’t intend to impugn the value of presidential job approval polls in general. It appears he was reacting more to the fact that the president’s approval numbers are not stable, but, in fact, in a period of some change. More specifically, Gibbs was reacting to our report Monday highlighting the fact that, while there was a short-term positive uptick in Obama’s job approval ratings after his Afghanistan speech last week, his ratings through the weekend fell back.
But this type of movement is the nature of the beast. Gibbs said that if Gallup were his EKG, he would visit his doctor. Well, I think the doctor might ask him what’s going on in his life that would cause his EKG to be fluctuating so much. There is, in fact, a lot going on at the moment -- the healthcare bill, the jobs summit, the Copenhagen Climate Conference, and Afghanistan.
We live in a representative democracy. Our politicians are accountable to the people. Certainly the accountability that matters most is on Election Day. But keeping tabs on the people’s views of their elected representatives between elections is vitally important – and something in which the people of the country are demonstrably interested. We at Gallup are fortunate to have the capability to interview random samples of Americans on a daily basis. This helps us closely monitor the ways in which presidential actions are being received by the national constituency.
Of course, it's not just Gallup that finds this important. I’m sure the White House was just as interested as we were in how the president’s major speech at West Point last week played to the American public. Our tracking helped provide the answer.
Obama is set to travel to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The White House is probably just as interested as we are in how the American public is going to react to this event. Our tracking will give us the answer -- both in the short-term and in the long-term. (And I’m sure the Obama campaign in 2008 paid a great deal of attention to their own tracking polls measuring how his candidacy was doing as the events of the campaign rocketed across the news each day.)
The foundation of the tracking poll is state-of-the-art, sound scientific sampling methodology, as is the same with all of our Gallup polling. Gallup reports presidential job approval using a three-day rolling average. Users are, of course, free to make whatever use they would like of the daily tracking information. The same pertains to their use of daily stock market reports, daily Nielsen ratings of television shows, or any other frequent measure.
how far has one sunk to be bitch slapped by poll nerds? I mmust say I'm impressed, the gallup dude has more guts(and brains) than 99% of the washington press corp.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18.
Confronted with their gloomy poll numbers, Democrats have decided the solution is to discredit the pollsters they blame for dragging down their standing with the public. Politico.com reports that the No. 1 target is the proprietor of Rasmussen Reports, source of widely reported polls tracking the declining popularity of President Obama and his legislative initiatives.
"Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama's popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency," reports Politico.com. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman complains that Mr. Rasmussen phrases polling "questions in a way that supports a conservative interpretation of the world." That's why Rasmussen's approval numbers for President Obama tend to be about five points lower than those of other pollsters, he says.
Mr. Rasmussen responds that any differences can be accounted for in large part because he screens for only those voters whom he determines are most likely to vote. This group, he says, is trending more conservative these days because they are highly motivated in opposition to Obama policies. Other firms poll adults without screening for likely voters, he told Politico, a procedure that's "always going to yield a better result for Democrats."
Most of us pay attention to polls because we want to know how upcoming elections are likely to play out and how the distribution of political power will change. On that score, Mr. Rasmussen seems to get solid results. FiveThirtyEight.com, a liberal Web site run by Nate Silver, found that Mr. Rasmussen had the third-highest mark for accuracy of any pollster in last year's elections. He predicted a six-point Obama victory; the final margin was seven points.
In 2009, Rasmussen did it again. His final survey in New Jersey had Republican Chris Christie beating Democrat Jon Corzine by three points, exactly the margin of Mr. Christie's victory. Says Mr. Silver: "Rasmussen's election polling has tended to be quite accurate in the past." He explains that "Rasmussen has a different model of what the 2010 election is going to look like, one which will feature a more conservative electorate. But that model isn't necessarily wrong, nor does it necessarily reflect bias."
Indeed, Mr. Rasmussen was in step with other pollsters charting the collapse of President Bush's approval rating. In November, 2008 it topped out at 62% disapproval in Rasmussen surveys, with a full 43% registering strong disapproval. Those numbers correctly anticipated the Democratic resurgence in that month's elections. Now that President Obama's numbers are trending downward, however, Democrats are lashing out rather than rethinking their policies. Democratic pollster Tom Jensen acknowledged as much to Politico, saying: "I don't think that what's happening with Rasmussen is unusual. It's just that sometimes when people are unhappy, sometimes you shoot the messenger."
That messenger is clearly becoming a force in politics, partly by polling more regularly and intensively than other companies such as Gallup. Pollster and blogger Mark Blumenthal says that in 2009 Rasmussen became the most searched-for polling firm on the Internet. It also apparently has become the No. 1 target for people who don't like its findings.
what is silly about the dems crying about this is if the polls are indeed hedged then people like the government takeover of their health. so who gives a fuck?
The poll indicates Americans are giving President Obama better marks on the handling of terrorism today than a few weeks ago. It was 45%-47% approval to disapproval before Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab’s failed Christmas Day terrorist attack; the January 8-10 poll indicated 49% approval compared to 46% disapproval. Either way, these are bad numbers for the president compared to May, when 55% of Americans registered approval of the president’s handling of terrorism.
What went wrong? A year ago, he was king of the world. Now President Obama's approval rating, according to CBS, has dropped to 46 percent — and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president's second year.
A year ago, he was leader of a liberal ascendancy that would last 40 years (James Carville). A year ago, conservatism was dead (Sam Tanenhaus). Now the race to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in bluest of blue Massachusetts is surprisingly close, with a virtually unknown state senator bursting on the scene by turning the election into a mini-referendum on Obama and his agenda, most particularly health-care reform. A year ago, Obama was the most charismatic politician on earth. Today the thrill is gone, the doubts growing....the reason for today's vast discontent, presaged by spontaneous national Tea Party opposition, is not that Obama is too cool or compliant but that he's too left.
It's not about style; it's about substance.
First energy, with cap-and-trade, an unprecedented federal intrusion into American industry and commerce. It got through the House, with its Democratic majority and Supreme Soviet-style rules. But it will never get out of the Senate.
Then, the keystone: a health-care revolution in which the federal government will regulate in crushing detail one-sixth of the U.S. economy. By essentially abolishing medical underwriting (actuarially based risk assessment) and replacing it with government fiat, Obamacare turns the health insurance companies into utilities, their every significant move dictated by government regulators. The public option was a sideshow. As many on the right have long been arguing, and as the more astute on the left (such as The New Yorker's James Surowiecki) understand, Obamacare is government health care by proxy, single-payer through a facade of nominally "private" insurers.
At first, health-care reform was sustained politically by Obama's own popularity. But then gravity took hold, and Obamacare's profound unpopularity dragged him down with it. After 29 speeches and a fortune in squandered political capital, it still will not sell.
The health care drive is the most important reason Obama has sunk to 46 percent. But this reflects something larger. In the end, what matters is not the persona but the agenda. In a country where politics is fought between the 40-yard lines, Obama has insisted on pushing hard for the 30. And the American people — disorganized and unled but nonetheless agitated and mobilized — have put up a stout defense somewhere just left of midfield.
Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.
He has 37% approval on health care and 58% disapproval.
And incredibly, despite this, Obama and the Democrat leadership want to ram through a final trillion-dollar healthcare bill in the next 2 weeks. Clearly against the will of the American people, an overwhelming majority of whom when polled oppose it.
If Obama's approval rate on the issue were over 50%, I still wouldn't like it, but I would have to accept that it was by some measure the will of the people. But this is clearly not what the people want, even with the best partisan sales-effort by the adoring pro-Obama media. And they're ramming it through anyway.
I'm very concerned this further adding of trillions to the debt (with cap-and-trade and amnesty-for-illegals next on the agenda) will collapse the dollar before Obama can be ejected from office.
How do we stop a government that has no compliance to the will of the people, not even compliance to those who elected Obama?
And what extremes to prevent Obama's extremism would be unjustified?
The labour government that has been in power over here in the UK for almost 13 years were still blaming the last party in power(conservatives) for all their own shortcomings up until recently!
They came into power with all the pomp Barry did and they have been massive failures!
Yeah, it's one thing to run on "change." It's another thing to point out where your predecessor made mistakes and why you suggest people not return to those policies.
It's quite another to blame everything on your predecessor.
When he was sworn in, President Obama enjoyed an approval rating of 68 percent, according to Gallup, compared with a disapproval rating of merely 12 percent.
But instead of uniting the country, Obama decided to use the economic crisis as an opportunity to push as many liberal initiatives as he could. He signed a $787 billion economic stimulus package that failed to keep unemployment under 10 percent, and attempted to ram through an overwhelmingly unpopular health care bill. In the end, the process descended into a series of backroom deals with the same special interest groups he pledged to fight, and hidden from the view of C-SPAN cameras he promised to let in the room.
Taken together, these actions alienated independent voters, who supported Obama because they thought he would govern as a moderate and change the cynical ways of Washington.
As of this writing, Obama's Gallup approval rating has dropped to 50 percent, while his disapproval has surged to 43 percent. Thus, on a net basis, Obama's rating has dropped 49 points in a year. And if that isn't enough, just yesterday, a Republican was elected to fill the seat once held by Ted Kennedy in a state that voted for Obama over Sen. John McCain by 26 points.
So in a sense, the midterms came early for Obama. On the one-year anniversary of his presidency, he'll have to decide whether he'll continue on his current course, which will cause further erosion of support among independents and subject his party to further losses. Or, like President Clinton, decide to scale back his liberal agenda and attempt to govern as the moderate many Americans though they were electing.
On the first anniversary of his inauguration, the President is dealing with the fallout from a stunning election upset in Massachusetts last night. On his way to victory, Scott Brown won unaffiliated voters by a 73% to 25% margin. That is consistent with a weakness among unaffiliated voters that has been evident in the President’s numbers for several months. Currently, just 25% of unaffiliated voters Strongly Approve of the President’s performance while 44% Strongly Disapprove.
It was independents who won the election for obama in Nov 2008. Now that they vitriolically oppose Obama's spending plans for Obamacare, cap-and-trade, stimulus bills, Omnibus, and other assorted bribes and backroom vote-buying deals, the more moderate Democrats will back off supporting any of this controversial Obama legislation, and it has all died a quick death with Sen.Brown's election in Massachusetts.
The people have spoken. And like it or not, the Democrats will now listen, or suffer even worse defeats.
