Polls on Presidential Approval Ratings:
The USA Today's coverage of the latest poll on the President's approval ratings made me wonder about what those ratings have been over the course of the Bush Presidency. I googled around a bit and found this very interesting chart, which apparently includes polling data from most of the major polling groups over time.
If Bush's job approval ratings drop into the low 30% range or into the 20s, then we will be dealing with something increasingly rare. Also, the longer Bush's ratings linger in their current range, the more unprecedented. Several of the presidents whose ratings have dropped below 40% recovered fairly quickly. Bush has more than 2 1/2 years to go as president, and the path of his job approval ratings going forward will be the real test of just how unusual his current poor positioning will turn out to be.
Bush, if he doesn't halt the slide with an invasion or something, will soon be in unprecedented territory as the most disapproved president in modern history.
Only four presidents have scored lower approval ratings since the Gallup Poll began regularly measuring it in the mid-1940s: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush. When Nixon, Carter and the elder Bush sank below 35%, they never again registered above 40%.
Truman twice sank into the low 30s and then rose into the 60s, but the third time his rating fell, it stayed below 40% as well.
His disapproval rating is quite high:
Just prior to his resignation as president, 66% of Americans said they disapproved of the way Richard Nixon was handling the presidency.
Harry Truman scored the highest disapproval rating in Gallup's history -- 67% -- in January 1952. Truman also scored the lowest approval rating in Gallup's history, 23%, in the same poll.
According to SurveyUSA: Only four states rate him above 50% (Utah, Wyoming, Idaho Nebraska).
I'd venture a complete guess here, but it may have something to do with the phrasing of the question. Zogby's question could result in more negative responses, whereas Gallup's gets more positive answers. Since they have to keep asking the exact same question (for continuity's sake) when they survey, the results are more accurate for showing trends based over time than among various polling agencies. Again, total speculation.
P.S. What's that spike around January 20th of this year? Google's Zeitgeist clued me into Hamas's electoral success in the Palestinian Authority, but it seems odd to me that it would produce a measurable spike for Bush's approval ratings. It's not like we caught Saddam or something.
Maybe the combination of Dems looking bad at the Alito hearings and good stock performance during the first few weeks of the year caused the Jan 20 spike.
Lots of opportunities to rally, but not much above 50%. Way No. 1: Bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Way No. 2: Rely on the Democrats to do something really stupid. I'd say either one has a good chance of happening.
I don't know, that doesn't seem entirely plausible to me. I never noticed the stock surge, though if it was broad and significant, that could be a boost. Also, I don't recall the Democrats looking particularly bad during the Alito hearings, except for the small minority who actually paid attention. Even then, it's not like it was a brouhaha, just a political party trying to make political hay in a freshly-mown field. You'd think there would have been a bigger boost when the Senate confirmed a new chief justice. Or a bigger dip when the President had to scuttle Miers.
Of course Bush is a real conservative. His policies on a whole host of issues are to the right of every President since the New Deal, including (at least in a number of regards) Reagan. It just turns out that (i) he's been inept dealing with big problems (Iraq, Katrina, etc.); and (ii) a number of his real conservative ideas, like privatizing social security, are pretty unpopular. Oh, and some of the more libertarian right get antsy about the "motivate the base" anti-gay initiatives and/or the torture/spying/secret prisons stuff. But they should have known better.
What does he have to do to get his numbers up with the rest of the electorate? Lower Gas Prices. It looks pretty apparent from this chart that the increase gas prices correlates very closely with his drop in approval ratings. More tax cuts wouldn't hurt either.
I posted an analysis of the pollkatz chart at my own blog a couple of months ago.
It's not surprising that he's "in the most trouble" with Democrats, but it's hardly inevitable that this "segment" (a plurality of the country) would disapprove to that extent. It doesn't say much for Bush's ability to be "a uniter, not a divider"; nor does his low-20s rating among independents.
Weird.
Didn't I say Bush's support amoung Democrats was "incredibly low", that's quite different from saying such low support was "inevitible". I think opposite party support that low is unprecedented, I also think it doesn't matter because the democrats are hardly a plurality. They are a minority party, and a shrinking one at that. And by shrinking I mean measured by election returns, not by asking someone how much they like the president right after they spent $50 filling up their gas tank.
Excellent analysis. Thanks.
Hoosier, what's your address? I'd like to send you weekly Twinkie shipments, at least until November.
My first correction to Westlaw came when an opinion that was overruled by "my" later opinion was merely yellow-flagged. "Yellow-flag my ass," I grumbled, &e-mailed Westlaw.
(About that case; I was a rising 3L interning for Judge William H. Barbour over the summer, and the second memo I wrote for him was recommending that he overrule an earlier, mistaken opinion of his own. Not what I wanted to be telling a federal judge in my first week, let me tell you. I was quite nervous until he handed back the memo, saying "I agree, let's publish it." Worth repeating as a testimony to the federal judiciary and to Judge Barbour in particular.)
Last time I checked, a plurality of the country self-identified as democrats. But even if you just want to count Repub. vs. Dem. voters in the past few national/federal elections, we're still talking about just about half the country. And of course you didn't say the low support was inevitable. It's my point to say that it's NOT inevitable, so Bush must be doing something wrong.
Houston Lawyer:
I'm glad you admit Bush is a "social conservative," but it's not convincing to argue that since Bush SPENDS, then, um, he can't REALLY be an economic conservative. Bush is an economic right-winger on a host of issues, from systematically cutting back on laws and regulations protecting unions and worker rights to making the income tax less progressive, etc., etc. Face it, he's a conservative. And while I think some conservatives are embarrassed at Bush's deficit numbers, and maybe even by his spending numbers, I hope at least some of the criticisms of Bush from the reasonable folks on the right are based on the factors I mentioned in my earlier post.
OK, I'll concede the point that Democrats are a plurality, except when it comes to actual voting.
And you are wrong about Bush making the income tax less progressive, Bush made the income tax MORE progressive. However I think the entire Federal tax structure including payroll taxes has become less progressive under Bush. But that is hardly his fault, his proposal for SS reform would have made the benefits payout more progressive, but it was blocked by the Democrats, and hardly emraced by the Republicans.
I'm not sure Bush made income tax alone less progressive: the bulk of the tax cuts went to the more affluent. And certainly if we count things like alterations to the estate tax, it's notably less progressive overall. So if we can agree that Bush has made the whole tax system less progressive, I'm willing to stop there.
And Bush's proposal for SS reform was hardly embraced by anybody, because it was totally unworkable on its face.
You're not serious about the latter, I trust? But it would be nice to know how they distribute the pollees (which is now a word, I've decided).
"Not in Mississippi" is all I can tell you for sure.
Yes, but they were paying the bulk of the taxes. On the whole, the income tax along was made more progressive, not less, by the tax cuts. See the CEA report that Profess Greg Mankiw links to here.
Estate tax is, of course, a different measure.
In any case, if you want a graph of Bush approval ratings, note this remarkable correlation between approval ratings and the inverse of gas prices.
You may be right about income taxes in isolation. But it's less progressive if you add in other aspects, e.g., the repeal of the estate tax.
And this hypothesis is incredibly insulting to the American people. Of all the issues ranging from the Iraq War to social issues, it's implausible they are focused exclusively on gas prices.
Kazinski: No, Democrats are close to a majority when it comes to actual voting for federal offices. Of course the last two Presidential elections been quite close (and Gore got more than Bush, as you might recall). But less well known, total up how many folks voted for a Republican Senator and how many voted for a Dem. Senator in the last election -- you might be surprised. "
If I remember, the Democrats outpolled the Republicans by a considerable margin, mostly because of the two candidates for the Illinois seat.
You can't use the vote for the Senate as any kind of measurement of total Republican and Democratic support. Because only 1/3 of the seats are up and 1/3 of the states don't vote at all it is not a very good measure of total voter sentiment. However I will say that even though the Republicans lost the total Senate vote by 5.5% we did pick up 4 seats, I'll take an ass whipping like that every time.
I don't want to accuse you of cherry picking facts to support your hypothesis, but let me ask you why would you pick the 2004 Senate races as the bellweather when you have the 2004 Presidential race(R-51%,D-48%), which at least included all the states, or the 435 house races (R-49%,D-46%) which should provide a much better statistical picture with a multitude of races spread out over the entire country? Is it because neither one support the view of a Democratic plurality?
Since 1950, this is the lowest job approval for a President facing midterm elections by more than ten points.
This is the first poll showing Bush's disapproval to be more than twice the size of his approval.
This is the lowest approval rating for Bush in any public survey since the start of his term.
Source: Mydd.com
the real doozy on the tax code change was the drop in the capital gains tax, given that the vast vast majority of taxable capital gains (i.e. not in tax advantaged savings vehicles) go to the top 5-10%.
Anyway, this president doesn't govern by polls. We had a president who did and left us with a recession and wide open to a terrorist attack.
More interesting in this regard are the polls showing that 15% more people want the Democrats to gain control of Congress. That would mean that a number of House races that are assumed to be safely Republican are going to go the other way.
I agree. Don't get me wrong, I have no axe to grindl if Bush is unpopular, that's just fine with me. But it just seems fatal to their credibility that they don't include information like: what was the question asked? What age group was asked? Where were they? What are their political affiliations? I mean, if you polled 1000 random residents of Boston, Massachusetts, the odds are, there is an inbuilt majority of people who despise Bush and everything he stands for, but if you poll 1000 random residents of Valentine, Nebraska, the average person is likely to be better-inclined towards Bush. Equally, the impetuous youth demographic disproportionately went for Kerry, so if your 1000 people are disproportionately young, that also skews your results. It's okay, they're young; like any good bourbon, they need a few years to sit and mature.
I'm not saying these folks don't know how to take a poll, what I'm saying is that if "trust me" doesn't cut it for the President of the United States, "trust us" sure as heck doesn't cut it for a polling company.
Wendy,
It really doesn't help your case to cite MyDD. It would be like a Republican citing Blogs for Bush as a source for some sort of information: not exactly a reliable source. If MyDD said that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, a majority of the blogosphere would start wondering if maybe there was something in that conspiracy theory after all.
No one's saying it's a conscious decision. When the price of gas goes up 50 cents, the collective mood of the nation is affected in a way that might be picked up in a broad poll. It might be "insulting" to the American people to point out that gas prices are more important than Iraq, but that doesn't make it false.
Also, I find it funny that beating up on Kerry during the campaign was almost as helpful for his job approval as capturing Saddam.
Iraq has very little to do with it? Have you checked out the incredible dive in poll numbers on specific questions like "do you approve of the way the President is handling Iraq" and "Was the Iraq War a mistake in the first place"?
Kazinski:
The point, which you're dodging, is that Democrats are not some small irrelevant segment of the country, they are, give or take, half the country. So attempting to dismiss Bush's dismal overall numbers as some artifact of a "segment" of the population disliking him is unpersuasive.
Rational Actor:
Yeah, the capital gains cuts too. More acts of an economic conservative.
Sorry I did misread your post.
JosephSlater:
The Democrats are not some small irrelevent segment of the country, and they have a real chance of retaking Congress. But the Democrats are irrelevant to Bush and the Republicans in the midterm elections. Republicans and independents are all they need for a working majority, they need to get the Republican base energized and they need to get about 40-45% of the independents.
The really hard thing for the Democrats this midterm is that Congress' approval rating is worse than Bush's. The main complaint voters have about Congress is that they fight too much and don't try to get along. So if the Democrats run on a platform of investigations, blocking the Presidents judicial picks and impeachments, which is what the base wants, then that will alienate the independents in the middle, at the same time energizing the Republican base. I think the Democrats will pick up a few seats in both chambers but will still be short of control.
By your logic, then, the fact that Bush is in the low 20s with independents is a problem.
The really hard thing for Democrats this midterm is the redistricting that makes an overwhelming number of seats relatively safe seats. The Dems' best hope is a general revulsion not just against Bush but against Republicans generally, based on scandals and incompetence as well as policy disagreements. It will be a tough row to hoe for the Dems., but the Repubs. seem to be doing everything they can to make it easier for them.
Mr. Bush's overall job approval rating hit another new low, 31 percent, tying the low point of his father, George H. W. Bush, in July 1992, four months before the elder Mr. Bush lost his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton. That is the third lowest approval rating of any president in 50 years; only Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter were viewed less favorably.
Incredibly negative press 24-7 for the past 5 years. **ding,ding, we have a winner! Can anyone remember a single story that was even marginally pro-Bush that had prominent play in the last, oh, say 3-4 years? Pretty much nada. There was 911, then zip for the following 4 years. I have never (and I have been around for a while) seen more negative press for any president, baring of course the extraordinary case of Richard Nixon.
It is really amazing when you stand back and look at it objectively. From the New York Times, to CNN, to the LA Times, to your hometown paper and your local news. Zip. Near constant negativity. At times (Cafferty, Olberman, et. al.) a thinly veiled loathing. Who among us has ever been subjected to such a relentless barrage? How could any politician or any public figure stand up against such an onslaught? Ain't gonna happen. Bush's numbers are permanently in the toilet until his press improves, and guess what? That ain't gonna happen either.
You're not pissing anybody off with that whine, but you're not convincing either. Aside from the obvious point that Bush's numbers used to be much higher with the same press in place ...
First, apparently you think nobody reads or listens to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and other conservative newspapers; all of Fox News; right-wing shows on other cable networks like Scarborough Country and the Tucker Carlson show; or pretty much all of talk radio. Oh, and there are some conservative blogs, if you haven't noticed. That all slants WAY further to the right than the so called "main stream media" slants liberal.
And as to the so called "liberal" part of the media, it was actually shamefully in the tank for the Bush administration in the run-up to and well into the war, not challenging or investigating assertions by the Bush admin. that ultimately proved entirely false. The Bush administration can take credit for that by intentionally intimidating folks -- "better watch what you say" -- and repeatedly implying that folks criticizing Bush's handling of the war were undermining the troops.
Bush's numbers are low because a majority of Americans correctly perceive that he's doing a lousy job.