Obama job approval rating drops under 50 percent

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama's job approval rating has dropped below 50 percent in a second major poll in an indication he is suffering from the long healthcare debate and weakness in the economy, Gallup said on Friday.

Gallup said 49 percent of Americans approved of Obama's job performance. A survey by Quinnipiac University on Wednesday had a similar finding, putting him at 48 percent support.

It was the first time he had fallen below majority support in those two polls. He had been polling in the low 50s for months after taking office in January with an approval rating just under 70 percent.

Gallup said Obama's drop in its daily tracking poll likely resulted from the contentious debate over healthcare as well as the poor state of the U.S. economy, with millions of Americans out of work.

"Americans are also concerned about the Obama administration's reliance on government spending to solve the nation's problems and the growing federal budget deficit," Gallup said in an analysis of its poll, which surveyed 1,533 people from Tuesday to Thursday. The margin of error was 4 points.

Democrat Obama became the fourth-fastest U.S. president since World War Two to drop below majority support in the Gallup poll, following Republican Gerald Ford, Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican Ronald Reagan.

Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said that although Obama's job approval was below 50 percent for the first time nationally, it was not statistically different from his 50 percent approval rating in October.

"Nevertheless, in politics symbols matter and this is not a good symbol for the White House," said Brown. "Moreover, the percentage who approve of the way he is handling the economy has dropped from a split 47-46 percent approval in October to 52-43 percent disapproval today."

It would matter much less as a symbol, even, if most people knew that all major national polls are conducted with a ±3 margin of error. So, Obama's approval rating may likely be 51% and that poll gauging his rating at "50%" could have bene as low as "47%", meaning Obama's gained support.

All, in all, polls that don't indicate massive differences in support are utterly pointless.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/readpoll.html

What?!? You can't spend your way out of debt? I guess I shouldn't have written those last 50 checks out of my checkbook after the balance hit $0.

I saw that Obama's approval rating with white people is 39% while being like 95% with blacks. Pretty big disparity.

I wanted to see what Bush's approval rating with whites was but couldn't find it.

My OWN approval rating for Obama is 95%, so I'm pretty much the token white girl there. Token white girl standing all the way in the back....

You might be forgetting that blacks are a traditionally liberal demographic, largely because the Republican party is very antagonistic to minorities. People make a big deal about how well Obama polls among blacks while forgetting that Gore and Clinton also did well in that demographic.


Lower than 39% for the last couple years he was in office. Bush set the record* for the highest disapproval rating ever for a US president (Nixon had a lower approval rating, but more people were on the fence so Bush's disapproval rating was higher). Interestingly, Bush also set the record* for highest approval rating ever shortly after the 9/11 attacks when the whole country wanted to rally around a leader.

*Of course, we only have opinion polls for about the FDR era on, and in the earlier years of that the polling was not so reliable. I imagine some of America's earlier presidents would have provoked even more extreme responses in both directions if we had polling data for those time periods.