Was Reagan a popular President? Comparing his average approval ratings during his time in office to the average approval ratings of other Presidents during the era of public opinion polling indicates that no, he was not a particularly popular President. Here is the easily accessible data from the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut:
Average Presidential Approval Ratings, FDR through current
President
# Polls
Approve
Disapprove
Unsure
Average Net Approval
Kennedy
40
70.8
16.6
12.7
54.2
Eisenhower
119
64.9
21.4
13.8
43.5
Bush I
134
62.1
27.2
10.7
34.9
FDR
97
62.4
31.5
6.2
30.9
Johnson
83
56.1
30.5
13.6
25.6
Clinton
838
56.7
36.3
7.0
20.4
Reagan
136
52.2
37.3
10.5
14.9
Nixon
96
48.0
37.8
14.1
10.2
Bush II
1289
51.5
41.9
6.1
9.6
Ford
36
46.5
36.9
16.7
9.6
Carter
91
46.7
38.4
15.0
8.3
Truman
65
42.0
43.2
14.7
-1.2
If, in order to determine how popular a President was during his time in office, one looks only at how a President performed during his re-election campaigns, then one is discarding over 99% of data on Presidential popularity. A good analogy is to compare looking only at re-election numbers to computer models designed to rank sports teams that incorporate the controversial margin of victory statistic. Which basketball team had the more dominating victory, a team that led by 25 points almost the entire game, but whose lead slipped to 12 in the final two minutes when the scrubs were in, or a team that was tied the entire game, but made a bunch of free-throws in the last two minutes to win by 14? Obviously, the former had a more dominating victory, since the game was never close. Looking only at the final result, and not the entire course of the game, provides an incomplete picture of overall team performance. In fact, looking only at re-election scores is even more flawed than incorporating margin of victory, since that would be the equivalent of only looking at the half-time score. The best solution is to plot out Presidential popularity over the entire course of a term in office, and to measure the space underneath the curve that represents job approval.
Over the course of his entire term, Reagan’s popularity was entirely unexceptional for polling-era Presidents, ranking 7th of 12. Regan is the low median, and is actually closer to Nixon’s average approval rating than he is to Clinton’s average approval rating. That conservatives do everything in their power to spread the myth that Reagan was more popular than Clinton is a clear ideological agenda that simply is not supported by the facts. It is also a project that Democrats and progressive should fight against, rather than assist.
A couple of other quick notes on this data. First, it won’t be long before Bush II falls behind Ford and Carter in terms of average popularity, to finish his term as the second-least popular President since Herbet Hoover. Second, the Democratic victory in 1992 was fortuitous, given the first Bush’s average approval rating. To return to the sports analogies for a moment, that was a major fourth-quarter rally on the part of Democrats. Reminds me of Illinois vs. Arizona in the Elite Eight back in 2005. (What a game! Arizona actually narrowly avoided an even worse collapse against Providence back in the Elite Eight in 1997.)
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