Obama's Approval Rating in Context

by: tremayne

Sun Mar 29, 2009 at 10:35


Barack Obama still enjoys a comfortably high approval rating and the higher it stays the more political power he is likely to wield. You can get stuff done even if your numbers decline but it gets harder. George W. Bush's plans for Social Security "reform" were dead on arrival, in part, because he had long since used up his political capital. Here are Obama's numbers from Pollster.com:

Obama's approval rating shows a slow steady decline. This is not unexpected. First, there's almost always a high-starting honeymoon period folowed by a decline. Second, he has pursued a very aggressive agenda and the more you try to change the more enemies you can expect to make. But given the times, most Americans remain hungry for change and I would attribute most of his small decline to the former.

When considering these approval numbers the questions arises: how does this compare to past Presidents? That part is ahead.
tremayne :: Obama's Approval Rating in Context

As I mentioned above, a President usually starts off with a very high number which begins either a slow or precipitous drop. Here's a nice graphic from WSJ.com which shows the pattern for the previous 11 administrations:

It's hard to see in this graph but George W. Bush had a pattern not too disimilar to Obama's. He was in the low 60s early on and declined down to about 50 percent just before 9/11 and the "rally around the President" effect.

One interesting observation from this graph: Presidents used to start off their terms with enormous goodwill. Even putting aside Harry Truman's starting numbers, President's in the 1950s and 60s enjoyed very strong initial support. That seems to have changed in the 1970s and in more recent cases, you start somewhere between 55 and 60 percent.

Obama's starting point, above 70 percent in some polls and above 65 percent according to the Pollster trend line, is a return to the pre-Nixon pattern. Perhaps cynicism, for a time, has lifted.


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Obama's Approval Rating in Context | 10 comments
What I find most interesting ... (0.00 / 0)
about the graph ... is the absolutely wild swings for Truman .. no one else had the bounces like that .. even Dubya just had the one bounce(due to 9/11)
maybe it's the methodology of the graph (0.00 / 0)
i assume there were less polls and perhaps conducted with less sophistication in the 1940s/1950s?  data like this always needs dissection.  I would also be curious what the effects of the extremely conservative (lower case c) institutions on attitudes, the economy, and of course the effects of major incidents like assassinations, wars, watergate seem pretty clear.  When conducted well, I think these polls are a fairly good reflection of how the people being surveyed think the country as a whole is doing since the President is seen as symbol for government / a lot of other stuff.  In that vein, I'm curious also about Clinton's approval ratings and their upward climb and what that is the result of.  I would also be really interested in a detailed look at reagan's 8 years as compared to obama's (maybe a bit later) because i think that might be the best comparison.
[ Parent ]
Dubya had three bounces (4.00 / 1)
They just don't register at the scale of this graph. If you examine this graph of Bush approval from the (now defunct) Prof. Pollkatz website you can see that his numbers jumped three times at what I call the Commander in Chief moments: 9/11, the Capture of Baghdad and Fall of the Statue, and the capture of Saddam.
http://pollkatz.homestead.com/...

These were all big pops of 40, 25 and 10 points and all happened essentially overnight. And note that none of these were actually due to anything directly done by Bush, instead the first one goes to the 'credit' of Bin Laden, while the latter two are the result of the Army doing its job. Despite the apparent similarities in the compressed WSJ graph there really is not to my knowledge a President with the same pattern of more or less steady erosion of support over an extended period of time punctuated by these individual spikes. That is previous Presidents would trend up and trend down.

At one time Prof Pollkatz had a combined approval graph showing all of them overlapped by year of office and you could see the clear differences in pattern. Unfortunately he had some copyright issues with Gallup and had to take it down.

On a final note you can see that after Jan 2004 Bush was only able to get back to 50% approval for a brief period, one that unfortunately coincided with the 2004 election. And even that was in my opinion just a reaction to the Swift Boating of Kerry. Generally speaking the more exposure people got to Bush the less they liked him. And this held true even through the period when the Press was all over the "Popular War Time President" meme. In total context that was never true, except among the 22% of dead enders every bit of his approval seems linked to a "Rally around the flag" sentiment.

[ Parent ]
The Modest, But Crucial Push-Up Of Bush's Numbers In The Last Half of 2004 (4.00 / 1)
is the real anomaly in Bush's record. Prof. Pollkatz had (has) a table of weekly poll tables, where you could see the ups and downs involved.  It had the looks of WWI trench warfare about it.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Aggressiveness? (0.00 / 0)

  The only truly "aggressive" aspect of Obama's presidency so far has been his budget proposal, and that's probably going to get hacked to pieces by the self-hating Democrats in the Senate.

  In just about everything else Obama's been very conventional and establishment-friendly -- Wall Street, foreign policy, drug policy. He's given lip service to EFCA, but hasn't exactly been loudly objecting to the Senate's abandonment of it. He's just blandly letting DLCism rule the day -- and that's not terribly aggressive.

  I suspect his still-impressive popularity stems from his personal appeal more than anything. That does count for something -- I just wish he'd use it to better ends.  

"We judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their actions. It is a great convenience." -- Howard Zinn

He's definitely likeable, at a personal level (0.00 / 0)
I like his sense of humor, too. :-)

I think, though, most of the public is still in a wait-and-see mode. Not everybody reads blog, ya know.  

435 Dem Primaries 2012
Coffee Party Usa
TheRealNews.Com

[ Parent ]
Yeah, I Know (0.00 / 0)
Not everybody reads blog, ya know.  

I read it on a blog.

Hey, what's the expiration date on that?  Oh, 2005?  Not good.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
IMO, considering the dashed-expectation factor points to a steep decline (4.00 / 2)
Obama was dealt a bad hand, but people's feeling about him are probably going to be based more on their expectations of what he could do about whatever problems the country faces, compared to other presidents. He really needs to deliver, but by taking care of Wall Street at the expense of the public and smaller, saner businesses, he is using up a lot of his bullets.

Are there any polls of expectations on the one hand, and degree of satisfaction in the president living up to those expectations, on the other, vs. a coarse-grain approval rating?

435 Dem Primaries 2012
Coffee Party Usa
TheRealNews.Com

The Merger of Perception (4.00 / 1)
I don't think popularity is important anymore.

The power of the president has, like corporate America become centralized and more focused. There are fewer corporations, fewer laws regulating them and therefore there is a concomitant lessening in the trickle down freedom that laws regulating corporations provided for the average citizen.

We have a one dimensional perception developing as a result of all these "mergers"...the biggest merge....is the merger of our perception. It's become entirely rigid.

People....the voting public are given no consideration unless they represent an organized block of voters or smaller blocks of people who are part of a corporate controlled financing.

People are seen as objects and treated as such by politicians and most importantly their sponsors...who are really pimps. Putting the politician out for display.

People have no power any more. It's concentrated into very few hands and the perception of the President is simply a manipulation by them.  

I Am Pretty Sure (0.00 / 0)
that the red line will show an inflection point by Summer.  The economy has been driving his numbers down, and by Fall an upswing will probably be underway and obvious to everyone.
Obama's Approval Rating in Context | 10 comments





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