Thursday, July 9, 2009

Obama's Approval Rating Falls to All-Time Low

Recent public opinion polls suggest a decline in President Barak Obama's popularity. First, a reliable poll of likely voters suggested that Obama's strongly disapproval rating exceeded his strongly approval rating for the first time. Second, a major poll suggested that Obama's approval rating had declined for the first time to below 54%, the percentage of the popular vote the Obama-Biden ticket received in the election for presidential electors in 2008. Third, a poll suggests a drop in Obama's approval rating to below 50% in the major swing state of Ohio.

All of these ratings reflect personal lows for Obama, but the media consistently reported personal lows for his predecessor, George W. Bush, as "all-time" lows, as if they were the lowest in the history of public opinion polling, which they were not. Indeed, as Bush had been a popular president during his first term, despite the Bush-Cheney ticket not having received a majority of the popular vote, as soon as his approval rating dropped below 50%, it marked a personal low. The constant reporting of personal lows as "all-time" lows -- often in polls commissioned by the media itself -- exaggerated Bush's decline in popularity and probably reinforced it, much as the frequent polling of Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal probably reinforced his popularity.

There are at least three of Obama's policies that have decreased his popularity: 1) Obama's announced closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for terrorists captured on the battlefield without a plan to detain them elsewhere, 2) His federal subsidization with taxpayer dollars for organizations that promote abortion abroad, and 3) Perhaps especially, Obama's massive spending and borrowing.

In a future post, I shall discuss public opinion polling more broadly, but for now I took the opportunity of this post to create a headline that demonstrates how the liberal media uses polling in a biased manner by turning the tables on them.

Please feel free to post a comment in order to query about public opinion polling in general in preparation for my upcoming post on the topic.

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