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by Hector N. Fertig
Since you are reading this, you probably have some interest in politics or at least are concerned about what is going on in Washington D.C. these days. Knowing only this, it is likely that you are less enthusiastic about the current administration’s performance than your politically disinterested friends.
The above chart was constructed from the polling numbers for President Obama as collected by RealClearPolitics. Blue dots are for polls taken from All Voters, Yellow dots are from Registered Voters and Red dots are from Likely Voters. Solid dots represent Approval numbers while Open or Empty circles represent Disapproval numbers.
President Obama’s numbers have naturally come down some since his inauguration (day 0). What I find interesting is where he maintains his support. In a sense, the less you follow politics – as measured by how likely you are to vote – the better this administration appears to be doing. In the most recent polls, his (Approval – Disapproval) Spread is +31 for All Voters (reported by Gallup), +24 for Registered Voters (reported by Quinnipiac) but only +7 for Likely Voters (reported by Rasmussen).
If these trends continue, the Obama Administration has two options: (1) address his sliding numbers among those most likely to participate in upcoming elections or (2) rely upon non-traditional voters. The other possibility, of course, is that these trends do not continue; either because Obama’s policies begin to resonate with large numbers of traditional voters or because the linear decline is not maintained. If it does continue, however, he projects to go negative with Likely Voters around the end of this August and with All Voters by mid-March 2010.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Hector N. Fertig, Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
UPDATE: July 29th, 2009
Approximately 4 weeks ago, I posted these trends that projected negative polling numbers for the Obama administration by the end of August for Likely Voters and by mid-March 2010 for All Voters.
With several new polls published on RCP since then, the negative zone has been pushed back slightly for Likely Voters to September 9th, 2009. The broader public, however, has pushed up their disapproval substantially with Registered Voters going negative by December 12th and All Voters by December 27th, 2009.
With key agenda items still in Congress, the Administration may need to push hard to get things through before the numbers become untenable.