http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1726 Released: July 24, 2009
Zogby Poll: President Obama's Job Approval Falls to 48%
Survey finds 51% believe U.S. on wrong track, while 41% say the nation is headed in right direction
UTICA, New York—A new Zogby Interactive survey shows a slight decline in President Barack Obama’s job approval, with 48% of likely voters now approving of the job he is doing as president, down from 51% who said the same in an interactive/telephone hybrid poll conducted in mid-June. Forty-nine percent now say they disapprove of the job the president has done so far in office and 4% are not sure.
The survey found similar results when likely voters were asked specifically to rate President Obama’s performance—47% give him a positive rating, with 22% rating his job performance as “excellent” and 25% rating it as “good.” But slightly more than half (53%) give the president a negative job performance rating, with 10% who say he is doing a “fair” job as president and 43% who say he is doing a “poor” job—up from 36% who said he was doing a poor job in mid-June. (Zogby uses a four-point scale of excellent, good, fair and poor, and aggregates excellent and good to determine positive ratings.)
The Zogby Interactive survey of 4,470 likely voters nationwide was conducted July 21-24, 2009 and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.5 percentage points.
"First of all, the two scales are identical showing President Obama with about as many approving as disapproving,” said John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International. “What is troubling for the President is not only his slide with voters but that they are re-polarized. He is strong with Democrats but only has 6% approval from Republicans and 40% from Independents. Support from young voters is high (59%) but he is down several points from the margin they gave him in November 2008. His support wanes as voters get older.”
As President Obama pushes for healthcare reform, this latest survey shows Americans are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the direction the country is headed—just 41% believe the nation is headed in the right direction, while 51% believe the U.S. is on the wrong track. A Zogby Interactive poll from late May/early June showed 49% thought the nation was on the wrong track, up from 45% who said the same in April. There is a sharp political divide, with Republicans (93%) and conservatives (95%) who overwhelmingly view the country as headed on the wrong track, in sharp contrast to Democrats (78%) and liberal voters (88%), who take a positive view of the country’s direction. Slightly more than half of political independents (56%) view the country has headed in the wrong direction, while 31% say the U.S. is on the right track.
“Right direction is now at just 41% -- certainly higher than when George W. Bush left office but a decline from higher numbers in the new presidency. Obama’s split with voters is precisely where Bush was before September 11, 2001,” Zogby said.
For a complete methodological statement on this survey, please visit:
http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.cfm?ID=1406 rasmussen poll
http://jtf.org/forum_english/index.php/topic,36466.0.html