President Obama’s approval ratings have been remarkably stable over the past four years.
If there’s one theme the political media has loved to play up over the past few years it’s been the idea of President Obama sinking in the polls. This trend was on display just a few days ago in The New York Times which ran a story about Democrats panicking over “President Obama’s sinking approval ratings.”
So is there any truth to these claims? Has the S.S. Obama finally hit an iceberg as so many conservative pundits have been predicting for all these years?
Well if you look at the evidence the answer is a pretty resounding no. This is not to say that Obama’s numbers haven’t gone down, they have over the course of his presidency, it’s just that the vast majority of this decrease happened during 2009 after the so called “honeymoon” of high approval that most presidents enjoy right after their inauguration wore off.
Kevin Drum had a nice piece the other day pointing out that Obama’s approval numbers over the last four years have been remarkably stable:
This prompted me to click the link and check out Obama’s approval rating in the HuffPollster’s polling average. This may not be a surprise to any of you, but I don’t follow Obama’s polls very closely and I was a bit startled by how consistent Obama’s ratings have been. The chart below shows Obama’s average approval over the past four years. It averages about 47 percent, and it hasn’t moved more than four points above or below that in the entire time.
In fact Obama’s approval numbers appear to be on the uptick a little bit since the fall of 2013.
Part of this discrepancy between the media “narrative” about Obama sinking in the polls and the reality of him not probably has to do with reporters just seeing one poll and running with it. After all since there are always a lot of polls coming in about presidential approval and disapproval you’re likely to get an outlier poll every once and a while letting you run out and write that “Obama Is Now Nixon!” story just like you’ve always wanted to. Part of it also might have to do with how the political media loves to write about Obama as a sort of clutch player who gets himself into jams only to escape at the last minute. He changed the game again! And some of it might just be plain laziness after all explaining how Congress works is hard! Predicting doom is pretty easy.
Whatever the reason, the reality is pretty clear: Obama is about as popular as he has been over the last four years.
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Gallup says his approval rating is 44%.
News Week … “President Obama recently promised to devote the rest of his presidency to addressing income inequality.
One simple measure of inequality is to look at the ratio of average to median, or midpoint, wages. For years the average grew faster than the midpoint, meaning that lower wage earners fell further behind the top half. An increase in this ratio signals rising inequality.
From 2009 through 2012, during the first term of President Obama, the same ratio grew on average 1.24 percentage points per year.”
How many years has Obama been in office?
There was a Rasmussen a few days ago that had him at 49%. Guess he turned it all around! The point is you want to average a lot of polls like so: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/obama-job-approval
According to Gallup, he’s at 40% approval. In so far as the ACA, the 45 million numbers are somewhat distorted. Those numbers included people who were transitioning in their jobs. For example, employees who start their new job and their benefits didn’t go into affect for 30/60/90 days and in some cases, companies have as much as a 6 to 12 month waiting period. Also take into account the number of employees who elected not to extend their benefits after termination of employment (employer cost + minimal admin fee). For millions out there, there has always been insurance plans available… Read more »
You have to be kidding me. I don’t know how he is doing in the Polls and it really doesn’t matter. Putin is kicking Obama’s ass. Putin is rebuilding the Soviet Bloc and I think too many Americans don’t even know what the Soviet Bloc was and don’t seem to care. When Putin starts putting missiles in Cuba then maybe America will wake up and realize the damage this idiot Obama has done. Obamacare was enacted so that the 15% of uninsured Americans would have Health Insurance, never mind that a good many of those made the personal decision not… Read more »