President Obama is polling at 46.8 percent, below the level needed to win re-election.
Gallup’s Lydia Saad (a family friend):
The president’s latest quarterly average is based on Gallup Daily tracking from April 20 through July 19. Across that time, his three-day rolling average approval ratings have been as high as 53% and as low as 42%, with the most recent readings falling on the lower end of that range.
Obama is in the company of several former elected presidents who averaged sub-50% approval during their 10th quarters in office. This includes three former presidents who won re-election — Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan — and one, Jimmy Carter, who lost. On the other hand, of the three presidents with exceptionally high average approvals at this stage, George H.W. Bush was ultimately defeated, while Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush prevailed.
This is the sixth straight quarter Obama has received less than majority approval. As a result, his average job approval rating has been below 50% for more of his presidency than it has not. However, both Clinton and Reagan experienced seven months of sub-50% average approval ratings in the middle of their first terms, indicating this is not a disqualifier for re-election.
Additionally, the lowest quarterly average ratings for Clinton (41.4%) and Reagan (38.8%) during these periods were lower than Obama’s lowest quarterly average to date (44.7%).
The top man on the list lost, as did the bottom guy. Bush was coming off the high of the victory in the Gulf War and the economy was about to go into recession. Carter inherited a lousy economy, managed it poorly, and was yet to face his biggest disaster in the Iran Hostage Crisis. The second lowest guy on the list, Ronald Reagan, went on to a landslide victory.
Unlike Obama, both Reagan and Clinton saw some improvement in their average approval ratings between the 9th and 10th quarters. However that momentum was not continued in the next few quarters, so the importance of the 10th quarter shift is unclear.
After persisting below 50% through most of 1983, Reagan’s average quarterly approval rating jumped above 50% in his 12th quarter (spanning surveys conducted between Oct. 20, 1983, and Jan. 19, 1984). Clinton and Nixon made this leap in their 13th quarters, less than a year prior to being re-elected.
Conversely, George H.W. Bush experienced a steep decline in his approval ratings during 1991 — the year before he was defeated — and by his 13th quarter — the beginning of 1992 — he dropped well below 50%, never to recover. Jimmy Carter saw his dismal 1979 average approval ratings improve in 1980, his re-election year, but never beyond 48%.
The 13th quarter, January through April of the election year, seems to matter:
The five presidents above 50 percent in the 13th quarter were re-elected; the two below were not. Lydia concludes:
President Obama’s job approval rating averaged just under 47% in the latest quarter, continuing a pattern of sub-50% approval ratings for him that started early in 2010. While this is not an auspicious indicator for a president’s re-election in the final months leading up to election, it is still too early to say what it forebodes for 2012. There is not a consistent enough pattern in the quarterly approval averages of prior presidents to say whether a 46.8% average approval in the 10th quarter points toward re-election or defeat. History suggests Obama’s 12th and 13th quarter ratings are likely to be much more valuable in this respect.
Let’s stipulate that 7 election cycles is a small sample size. But it constitutes the entire data set of modern-era presidents who were elected and sought re-election. (John Kennedy was murdered in his 12th quarter, Lyndon Johnson didn’t run for re-election, and Gerald Ford wasn’t elected.) So it’s dangerous to draw definitive conclusions from this history.
Still, the best evidence we have is that the approval of the sitting president is the decisive factor in popular elections–not the candidate running against them or, indeed, the dynamics of the re-election campaign. We pundits put an enormous amount of emphasis on personality and day-to-day events because we obsess over the news as it happens. Additionally, we naturally view the contest as a horse race, looking to see who’s ahead, who’s gaining, and who’s losing speed. Normal people, though, really aren’t paying any attention.
Presidential popularity isn’t fixed. George H.W. Bush’s plummeted 32 points from the 10th quarter to the 13th and Ronald Reagan’s went up 10 points. Right now, though, Obama is slightly below where Jimmy Carter was in his 13th quarter. History seems to say that he needs to get up into the 51 range to keep his job. That’s doable: Reagan did it from 2 points further back and Nixon and Clinton did it from essentially the same point. And the House Republicans are doing their best to help.
