Pollster John Zogby says that President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have fallen fast in the last month or so. According to Zogby’s latest poll, only 50% of voters approve of Obama’s job performance while approximately the same amount (50%) say they disapprove of his actions in office. Such low approval ratings are historic considering Obama has only been inaugurated two months ago. Support is normally much higher for a fresh and new president.
Zogby explains the drop in support as follows: ““The numbers are going down. It’s not because of the gaffes, but a combination of high expectations and that things aren’t moving fast enough with the economy.”
Of course we will never know whether his ‘gaffes’ and mistakes have or haven’t contributed to the trend noted above, but Zogby’s point is well taken: Obama ran a campaign based on ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ Many of his supporters thought he would bring about change – whatever change exactly no one knew, for he was supported by different groups favoring different kinds of changes – instantly. Sadly for them, however, it doesn’t quite work like that in politics. Politics is a slow process.
Additionally, it’s likely that Obama has lost support from moderates and Independents, many of whom supported him thinking he would govern as a moderate and end the culture of partisan hackery in Washington, D.C. Instead, Obama has behaved like a real liberal Democrat, who wants to govern from the far left rather than the center or center-left.
Although Zogby’s poll may be bad news for liberal Democrats and Obama, it’s good even great news for those who believe the U.S. should be governed from the center. The more support for Congress and the president himself drop, the more power and influence Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans (in Congress) have. Obama wants to be reelected, and so do most members of Congress. They’ll do anything to prop up their poll numbers.
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I am so disappointed in Barak Obama and I voted for him. All I had to do was watch the training video of the Obama youth to realize what we had done.
Let us hope that our fears are unfounded as his Obama Youth go door to door convincing people to sign pledge cards essentially pledging loyalty to Barak Obama.
This is fraidykatt territory here. Im glad to see his numbers falling to be honest. Had he done what we all thought he would his numbers right now would be in the 70 percent range still.
A poll is meaning less if the sample isn’t random. Maybe we should let People magazine readers or AmericanIdol voters decide how Obama’s doing.
http://interactive.zogby.com/pollregistration/registration/index.cfm?refsite=sbbanner
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/worst-pollster-in-world-strikes-again.html#comments
http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/jobapproval-obama.php
Rudi, all the polls are showing a downtrend though. Pew had his approval rating at 59% last week, with his disapproval rating climbing. 59% still isn’t that bad but I think historically it’s pretty unusual to see such a big drop so early in a presidency, especially after we heard so much about his immense popularity (even though it was actually historically on par with other newly elected presidents) right after the inauguration.
This post was just about the “poor” Zogby Internet poll. The 538 link above rips this poll to shreds. Play around with the interactive Flash chart over at Pollster to put all in context.
I’m with Rudi here. Even if Obama is dropping (which isn’t all that surprising), non-random sample surveys are just not as representative as random ones.
If you read Nate’s article at FiveThirtyEight, he gives a pretty decent reason as to why not to take the poll seriously. Consider that the big stories of internet polls are usually groups of people mobbing them to get a desired result. Stephen Colbert just won a contest to name a new Space Station room for this reason.
I’ve noticed that Zogby tends to be one of the preferred pollsters for the more conservative crowd while Gallup tends to be used by the more liberal crowd. So if more conservatives are visiting Zogby and signing up for his Internet poll, of course it’s going to be skewed.
Situations like this are why I take single polls with about salt lick sized skepticism. I much prefer the aggregation. Undoubtedly they have their issues, too, but probably it presents a better picture than the single polls alone.
Speaking of which, I notice RealClearPolitics doesn’t even seem to include Zogby in its averages (they haven’t since January). That’s interesting. It certainly explains why they’re average is more Obama friendly. Pollster includes the Zogby poll cited above.
My wife is a teacher. She came home and throws this book on the table and says “I can not believe the garbage they are wanting us to teach”
Huh? I said.
“Read it.” There is one full page devoted to Cindy Shehan.
Liberal bias is what is erroding the young peoples respect and desire to want to join the GOP and conservativism. This nation is slowly and irreversibly headed the path of socialist Europe.
Obama doing things like cutting the charity tax exemption for the rich is one more way in which charities are being squeezed by government competition so that we more and more turn to the government for our every want and need.
I do not want to live under a socialist nation. I want life to have a bit of challenge. By challenge I don’t mean who is going to be the next supermodel, American Idol or my new best girlfriend.
I want life to be challenging and rewarding. America beginning in kindergarten is teaching our young kids that socialism is the way to lead a meaningful and productive life.
As my wife says…”I can’t believe the crap they are teaching in schools.”
And now you know why both the GOP and the Democrats believe in education. Both just have different ideas about what it should teach.
LMAO – Rudi you never fail to amuse
FraidyKatt,
If you voted for Obama, I’ll eat my hat. I am a Republican and I voted for Obama and I am very pleased with his work although I am upset at his position on the only liberal viewpoint I have–education. Zogby polls are known to be as skewed towards the Right as Air America is to the left.
As for education, I continue to be amazed that we complain about being behind the rest of the world but then say the solution is to do the opposite of what those countries do–more testing, privatizing, and putting schools into competition so that they have a choice of easily falsifying test results or sometimes impossible efforts to teach and provide test prep to non-privileged children. I’m no fan of Cindy Sheehan, but her having a few paragraphs in a text as the problem with education or even having two gay children’s books in some corner of a library of 10,000 titles is an example of the problems parents make for schools.
Yes, you’ve got it, I am a principal and I still have my principles… about a poll being across the spectrum and schools teaching not accommodating and prepping for tests.