Obama approval dips below 50

President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have dipped below 50 percent for the first time in one prominent poll amid a raft of bad news about the economy and continuing job losses.

The nation’s economic woes pushed Obama down to a 49 percent approval rating in the respected Gallup daily tracking poll out Friday. Gallup said Obama's approval rating had been holding in the low 50s since September but hasn’t dropped below 50 percent until now.

Obama started out his presidency with 68 percent approval rating in Gallup and saw most of the decline in July and August. One veteran pollster, Syracuse University’s Jeffrey Stonecash, said the steep decline is the result of unreasonably inflated expectations about what Obama could accomplish in Washington.

“I’m not surprised by the demise here because the expectations I think were really unrealistic,” Stonecash said. “He has huge problems trying to get this morass of the Democratic Party to move and to work to accomplish what he wants. The longer [health care] drags out the more his ratings are going to go down.”

Stonecash also said he sees no recovery for Obama’s numbers unless and until the economy rebounds. Asked if passage of health care will give the president a boost, the professor said, “No. The economy has got to turn around. Seems to me this is very much like Ronald Reagan in 1980 where he knew the economy was going to cost some members their seats in ’82 and he waited, hoping it would come around by the time he faced re-election. Obama’s hoping all’s going well by the time we get to 2011.”

Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said the most recent three-day sweep of tracking data had Obama at 82 percent approval among Democrats, 43 percent among independents and 17 percent among Republicans. “The big erosion from his 60 percent approval levels is coming among independents and Republicans,” Newport said.

“Obama’s following a fairly standard pattern,” Newport said. “Maybe that’s the story: that he’s no exception, when many thought he’d maintain a very high rating.”

Newport noted that Obama has not experienced the kind attention-grabbing event that has affected other presidents in their first year: Reagan was shot, boosting his numbers; Ford slumped after pardoning Nixon and George W. Bush surged after the Sept. 11 attacks to the highest-ever approval rating for a U.S. president.

While most of the erosion in support Obama has suffered since taking office is driven by the economy, the dip below 50 percent may well have been due to his recent week-long trip to Asia, according to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

“Recently, his job performance numbers have gone down whenever he’s out of the country,” Lake said. “News of the president traveling abroad is always mixed. Even if it’s good, people wonder why isn’t he worrying about what’s going on at home. And when it’s bad, as it was in China, people wonder what he’s accomplishing.”

“For long-term policy reasons, it’s the right thing to do, but for Democrats and for poll numbers it’s the wrong thing,” Lake said.

Lake said that the key to reviving Obama’s approval ratings will be conveying a message that he is taking emphatic steps to create jobs.

“The president is bogged down in this health care debate,” she said. “I think these numbers will rebound when the president, after passing health care, really aggressively sends a message about jobs.”

Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said the 49 percent approval rating understates the seriousness of the political problems facing Obama and his fellow Democrats next year. “When you talk to likely 2010 votes—those numbers are worse. The fact he’s under 50 with adults…that puts him in the mid-40s with likely voters,” Fabirizio said.

Fabrizio said the health care debate is doing lasting damage to Obama with independent voters. “They’re hell bent on doing health care. It’s ‘damn the torpedos, we’re going’ even though all the polls show people don’t support it, at least the kind of bill they’re talking about.”

The GOP pollster said the time is getting short for an economic surge that could improve the chances of Democrats next fall because voters take a while to feel the effects of recovery. “We’d have to start seeing some dramatic turnaround in the first quarter of next year for it to be a significant factor in the election. So time is running out. Is it impossible? No,” Fabrizio said.

Fabrizio also said Obama and the Democrats are in a Catch-22 since more dramatic steps to aid the economy could further alienate voters concerned about the national debt and government spending.

Congress and the administration will “have little effect on jobs, as much as they’d like to think they do unless they’re planning to spend another trillion dollars which only puts them further in the hole, both financially and politically,” the pollster said.

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