US President Barack Obama returned from his trip to Asia facing some unsettling news: Two new polls showed that his approval rating had dipped below 50 percent for the first time.
To many of his critics, who had chafed as he enjoyed broad support among Americans even as many were critical of his handling of specific issues like the economy, this erosion is a tipping point, the end of Obama’s perceived near-invulnerability.
In many ways, the slide should not come as a surprise. And coming less than a year into his presidency, not to mention almost a full year from next year’s congressional elections, its long-term political significance is anything but clear.
Still, there is cause for the White House to be concerned, and for Republicans to sense an opportunity. The poll numbers worry Democratic strategists preparing for the already tough congressional elections. They are well aware that presidential approval ratings can be a predictor of the outcome of midterm contests, especially when those ratings fall below 50 percent in the two months before the election.
Polls by Gallup and Quinnipiac University at the end of last week showed that Obama’s job approval rating had dropped below 50 percent, though not by much: It was 49 percent in the Gallup poll and 48 percent in the Quinnipiac poll.
Obama’s poll numbers reflect an array of challenges that have combined to create a sour climate for him. The unemployment rate has jumped above 10 percent and shows no sign of declining. At this point, even if Obama cannot be blamed for causing the economic decline, Americans seem increasingly impatient with him to fix it.
His health care bill is the subject of a messy fight in Congress, displaying the bitter partisanship Obama had promised to end. It has provided Republicans a platform to stir concerns that Obama is using the health care overhaul to expand the role of government beyond the comfort level of many Americans.
And not incidentally, the president was out of the country for 10 days when the polls were released. As Obama learned when he went overseas as a presidential candidate in the summer of last year, his approval ratings tend to drift down when he travels abroad. It presumably did not help that much of the news media coverage of Obama’s visit to China was critical.
Obama’s aides argue that the political culture of Washington is too fixated on this kind of polling.
“I think the history of these things is that Washington becomes absorbed with them,” David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama, said in an interview on Sunday. “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.”
Still, there does seem to be the suggestion of a trend here. One interesting thing about Obama’s presidency has been the gap between how Americans judge his handling of various issues — particularly the economy and Afghanistan — and their view of him personally. Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, has long argued that the gap between how Obama’s policies are viewed and how he is viewed is politically significant, and that it was only a matter of time until the two measures meet. If that happens, Republicans could find it easier to engage Obama, be it challenging him on policies in Washington or running against him in congressional elections next year, the way Democrats ran against former US president George W. Bush in the 2006 midterms.
If Congress passes Obama’s health care bill, the White House — and many independent analysts — believe that the accomplishment of a signature campaign promise is likely to push the president’s approval ratings back up. A decline in the unemployment rate over the next six months could have much the same effect.
History suggests that Obama’s approval rating could be a major factor in determining how his fellow Democrats fare in the midterm elections. It is an urgent concern for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has distributed a slide-show presentation to supporters charting the correlation of a president’s job approval rating to his party’s performance in midterm congressional elections.
For the past 50 years, almost without exception, the party loses seats in November when its president’s average approval rating in September and October drops below 50 percent.
Axelrod did not dispute the notion that the fate of some Democratic incumbents could rest on how popular Obama is next summer. That is precisely the argument White House officials are making to nervous Democrats in urging them to rally around the health care bill, rather than risk a debilitating defeat for Obama that could turn Americans against him.
“We’re in this together,” Axelrod said. “But the folks who are running next year have the most immediate stake in the success of health insurance reform. Having come this far on something of such importance, it’s hard to see the political benefit of failure now.”
A collapse of the health care initiative could be a major problem for the Democrats, possibly for years to come. Democrats in Congress would have less than a year to recover. Obama would have three.
An impossible task? Former US president Bill Clinton saw his health care plan collapse early in his first term, and he managed to rebuild himself politically in time to cruise to re-election in 1996, even after his party got wiped out in the 1994 midterms. It took until 2006 before Congressional Democrats fully recovered from those losses.
Former US president Ronald Reagan’s average job approval rating before his first midterm congressional election, in 1982, was 42 percent — and Republicans that November lost 26 seats. Two years later, Reagan carried 49 states as he galloped to a second term.
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