Obama Waking Up to All-Time Low Approval Rating?
President Barack Obama’s approval rating dipped to an all-time low in Gallup’s daily tracking poll Sunday – a day before his three-day bus tour of the Midwest begins.
Sunday’s Gallup data showed that only 39 percent of Americans approved of Obama’s performance, the lowest in the daily tracking poll that calculates a three-day rolling average. Another 54 percent conveyed their disapproval.
Obama’s job rating has hovered in the 40 percent range for much of 2011, peaking at 53 percent in the weeks following the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But it has now sunk below 40 percent for the first time, The Los Angeles Times noted.
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“But Americans’ view of his job performance continued to tick downward as the debt-ceiling debate heated up. By the time he signed legislation averting a federal default, he was mired in the low-40% range,” it said.
The wave of anti-incumbency sentiments is also being attributed to “a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job,” according to CBS News. A “deeply unsettled political landscape” is framing the 2012 presidential race with voters in a “fiercely anti-incumbent mood” 15 months before the presidential election.
President Obama, however, seems to suggest that he has time to deal with anti-incumbency. “We’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be,” The Associated Press quoted Obama as saying over the weekend. “We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it.”
Obama also blamed it on partisanship last week. “What we’ve seen in Washington the last few months has been the worst kind of partisanship, the worst kind of gridlock – and that gridlock has undermined public confidence and impeded our efforts to take the steps we need for our economy,” he was quoted as saying in Michigan. “It’s made things worse instead of better.’’
While the White House denied that the tour was politically motivated, Fox News said President Obama would try to address the concerns among voters and “sustain his resurrected fighting spirit” as he kicks off the bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois Monday. “The trip is timed to dilute the buzz emanating from the Midwest after Republicans gathered in Iowa over the weekend for a first test of the party’s White House candidates. The state holds the nation’s first nominating test in the long road toward choosing Obama’s opponent.”
The three-day tracking poll was conducted by telephonic interviews with approximately 1,500 national adults from Aug. 11-13. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, according to Gallup.
