Like an early-autumn frost, a blast of pessimism about the country’s direction has snapped a slow but steady warming trend toward President Obama in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey.Keep reading.
Just 44 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Obama’s performance as president—his lowest rating in the 10 Heartland Monitor polls conducted since April 2009. Likewise, the share of adults disapproving of his performance also reached a high at 50 percent. Those results reversed modest but consistent gains for Obama since his previous low point in the survey in August 2010. In the most recent survey, conducted last May in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden raid, Obama’s approval rating had edged up to 51 percent, with only 41 percent disapproving.
Equally ominous for the president: 70 percent of those polled in the new survey said that the country was on the wrong track. That’s a sharp increase just since the most recent Heartland Monitor in May—and by far the highest level of dissatisfaction over the country’s direction recorded in any of the 10 polls. (The previous high was 62 percent in August 2010, just before the GOP landslide in the midterm elections that year.) Only one-fifth believed the country was moving in the right direction.
Most political scientists and pollsters agree that, especially in presidential races involving an incumbent, those bottom-line measures—the approval rating and the right-track/wrong-track assessment—are the most powerful predictors of the vote. Obama still has time to regain lost ground, but on both fronts, his position today more resembles the profile of incumbents who were defeated than those who won reelection.
Just thirty-five percent of independents approve of Obama's job performance. This political scientist thinks he's toast. I can't wait for November 2012.
1 comments:
What's rather horrifying, is that 44% approve of his job performance.
That's a scary chunk of the population.
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