Harris poll puts Obama approval at 45%
  • Barack Obama might have hoped that an unexpected Nobel Peace Prize might halt his slide in the polls. Not so, says the latest Harris interactive poll, conducted over the last week. The survey contacted over 2200 adults on line, and his numbers dropped significantly from September’s poll, giving Obama an unfavorability rating of -10

    Harris gives Obama one minor point of consolation — his numbers are better than that of Congress. That’s almost always the case anyway; George Bush at his lowest point in the polls scored better than Congress. However, the Harris poll found a peak approval rating for Congress in May of 31%. It has been cut almost in half since then to 16%.

    Otherwise, though, the numbers look pretty bleak. The percentage of voters rating Obama “excellent” peaked in April at 18%, but has now dropped to 10%. “Pretty good” has come in for a softer landing, from 42% in May to 35% now. “Poor” has almost doubled from April’s 15% to October’s 28%, while “only fair” has remained constant over the last seven months at around the current 27%.

    As the Harris summary mentions, the only age group Obama wins is the youngest (18-32), and only barely at 51%/49%, and only 10% of these think Obama has done an “excellent” job. He loses the other three age categories by wide margins, from 10 points to 22 points. Most troubling for Obama and Democrats as they close out their first year of single-party control of DC are the independents. Obama has a -20 favorability gap among unaffiliated voters, with only 6% rating him as “excellent” while 28% rate him “poor”.

    Harris did not poll on individual issues as some other surveys do. However, given the timing of Obama’s decline in the Harris poll over the year, it suggests that Obama has seriously miscalculated on the overhaul of the American health-care system — and the longer that drags out, the worse he does.