Obama's Popularity Rating

Rasmussen has been tracking President Obama's "Approval Index", the ratio of those who "strongly support" vs. those who "strongly appose" the President. Rasmussen reports that this ratio has been steadily falling, as the number of people who "strongly appose" Obama has risen and the number who "strongly support" him has fallen. We conservative had to suffer through Bush's abysmal approval ratings, and so we wonder if it is too early to enjoy some schadenfreude at Obama's expense. Obama appears to be very popular. Is this Approval Index a goofy number which is explicitly designed by conservatives to show Obama in a poor light? How does Obama's popularity rating compare to other elected presidents?

To find out, I reviewed the popularity of Obama as compared to all the recent elected Presidents. I used the data available from the Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I ignored presidents who were "unelected into office", such as Truman, Johnson, & Ford. I had assumed that every president gets some type of honeymoon, and so wanted to consider the early portion of their terms, just as they were elected. I wanted to compare them to Obama. I was hoping to discover if Obama's popularity is "normal" for newly elected presidents.

In summary, I found that Obama is right in the middle of the popularity pack of recent elected presidents. He is more popular than George W Bush was at this point, but is much less popular than Kennedy or Eisenhower, and about the same as Richard Nixon. He is much more popular than Bill Clinton, who was extremely unpopular at this point in his presidency.

click on images to get larger view

I was surprised by 2 things from this data:

• 1. There is no reliable presidential honeymoon when it comes to approval rates, and
• 2. Obama's popularity is only average for a new president

My assumption about presidential honeymoons was not supported by the data. Reagan, for example, saw his score start out low and then quickly increase about 10 points in his first 30 weeks in office. Clinton too had low numbers early in his presidency, but was able to raise them later.

One would think that Obama is wildly popular. The press he receives is almost completely positive (unless one counts conservative bloggers who are almost completely - and predictably - negative on Obama). Most conservatives are extremely critical of the Mainstream Media (MSM) for being biased in Obama's favor. The most grievous example of this is Newsweek's Evan Thomas who described Obama as "sort of god" in response to Obama's speech in Cairo. Obviously, the average American voter (as polled by Rasmussen) does not deify Obama the way most professional news gathering organizations seem to do. One would never have called Richard Nixon, or even Eisenhower, a god. JFK is still popular, but even he had to live in Camelot, not heaven. Only Obama seems to have moved the Whitehouse to Mount Olympus.

Another interesting things I learned from this exercise is how extremely volatile presidential approval rates are. The most extreme example of this is Truman, who saw approval rates as high as 91%, and as low as 22%. George W Bush also saw a precipitous and continual slide from a high point after September 11. In fact, most presidents saw their popularity slide while in office. The only partial exception to this is Bill Clinton, who left office slightly more popular than when he entered. It's interesting that we generally think highly of Truman today, despite his horrible poll numbers. Likewise, Clinton is thought to be an average president, and had average polls. Conservative such as me predict that with time, George W Bush will see a Truman-like reappraisal, but we'll have to wait a few decades before we can evaluate how prescient this prediction is.

The file that created all these charts can be downloaded by clicking here.