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Plummeting poll numbers not a concern

By Gaveliers, The Gavel Media Team, on December 7, 2009 5:56 PM

By Andrew Schofield -

President Barack Obama returned this past week from a ten-day trip to Asia to find that his approval ratings had plummeted to all-time lows. Two polls released recently, a Gallup Poll and a Quinnipiac Poll, found that Obama’s job approval rating had slipped below 50 percent for the first time in his presidency at 49 percent and 48 percent respectively.

It is not a surprising fall for Obama given the political climate today. The honeymoon during the first 100 days of his presidency when he enjoyed approval ratings in the high 60s is over. The unemployment rate has hit double digits. The conflict in Afghanistan seems to worsen each month as some of the bloodiest months have occurred recently. Unpopular bitter partisanship, that Obama promised to end, dominates Capitol Hill, as the fight for the passage of the health care bill gets messier by the day.

Obama and his aides will argue that the polls mean nothing at this time, and all that matters is the job at hand dealing with health care reform, Afghanistan, and the tumbling economy.

As David Axelrod, a senior advisor to the president, told The New York Times, “I think the history of these things is that Washington becomes absorbed with them. But not every day is Election Day. There’s not all that much relationship about what these things mean and what’s going to happen in an election a year — or three years — in advance.”

Axelrod is right. At this point, Obama has little to worry about concerning the new poll numbers. He has three years to turn his approval ratings back up. And if health care reform, one of Obama’s major campaign promises, is passed, his ratings should get a large boost.

Also, the fact that Americans have shown that they have a much higher opinion of Obama as a person than they do of his handling of particular issues should allay some fears and instill confidence that he can easily turn his approval ratings around.

History is on Obama’s side. In 1994, after Bill Clinton’s health care reform collapsed, Republicans made sweeping gains in the midterm elections. But just two years later, Clinton rebuilt his image and won reelection. Early in Ronald Regan’s first term, he had a lowly approval rating of 42 percent, yet he recovered in time to crush Walter Mondale for reelection. So this early in his term, Obama has no reason to fret.

His approval ratings, however, are not completely meaningless. Democratic congressmen up for reelection, not Obama, should be the ones worrying if Obama’s approval rating remains below 50 percent. For the past 50 years, the controlling party, on nearly every occasion, has lost seats if the President had an approval rating of less than 50 percent.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is even taking notice of the trend. According to The New York Times, it has distributed a slide-show presentation to supporters, charting the correlation between a president’s job approval rating and his party’s performance in midterm Congressional elections.

Although Obama has little reason to worry at this point, he has no grounds to completely dismiss the polls either. The message to the president in the declining approval ratings is simple: America expects better results. The current economic condition will not be acceptable when Obama is up for reelection, nor will the situation in Afghanistan. Luckily, Obama has plenty of time to turn his presidency around. However, his fellow Democrats in the Congress might not be as fortunate.