Two new polls are out and neither have good news for President Barack Obama as his Presidency nears the 200 day mark: A CNN poll has him dropping 7 points in a month, to a 56% approval rating while a new Quinnipiac Poll puts him at 50 percent.
The big drop? According to CNN the biggest drop and the one that is doing the most damage is amont white male voters — a sign of both the damage Obama inflicted on himself in his initial comments about the Gates affair and what some analysists say is the GOP’s return to the white voter strategy that paid dividends for the party in past elections.
Details from CNN:
As President Obama approaches 200 days in the White House, a new national poll shows his approval rating has dropped seven points since the 100-day mark in April.
he CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday morning also indicates that while just one in five Americans say that the current economic conditions are good, the number who feel the economy is in very poor shape is dropping.
Fifty-six percent of those questioned in the poll approve of how Obama is handling his duties as president. Four in 10 disapprove.
The 56 percent approval is down five percentage points from June, and represents a drop of seven points from the president’s April showing. The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. figures are in line with numbers from most other national polls out the past few weeks. See the full results (pdf)
“Since April, Obama’s rating has stayed steady among white women, but he has dropped 14 points among white men. A majority of white men supported him at the 100-day mark, but now most white men disapprove of how he is handling his job,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Obama has also slipped among non-whites, but he still gets support from over 70 percent of that group.”
And a warning flag for Obama: the numbers are now turning against him on the economy:
The number one issue dominating the first six months of the Obama presidency has been the economy. According to the poll, 44 percent say that Obama’s polices have so far made the economy better, with just of half of Americans saying they haven’t had a positive effect.
Should the GOP be happy? Not entirely:
So who is getting blamed for the current economic conditions? The survey indicates that more than four in 10 are pointing fingers at Republicans, with around one in four blaming the Democrats and another one in four saying both parties are equally at fault.
“The bad news for the GOP is that they get twice as much blame as the Democrats,” says Holland. “The good news for the GOP is that the number of Americans who blame them is now below 50 percent.”
Meanwhile, Quinnipeac has Obama at a new low:
–Obama has a 50 – 42 percent job approval rating, down from 57 – 33 percent July 2.
–Voters disapprove 49 – 45 percent of the way the President is handling the economy.
And while voters approve of the way he’s handling foreign affairs 52-38 percent, they disapprove 52-39 percent to the way he’s handling health care.
This number likely represents liberal Democrats (he isn’t doing enough and has deferred to moderates and not use the Democrat’s majority and clout skillfully) and conservative Republicans (he wants to do too much too quickly). It’s likely that number it isn’t just that you can’t please all of the people all of the time but you can displease two sides some of the time.
What does it mean? Polls translate into clout and this makes Obama and his policies a more tempting target for Republicans. It could also encourage those GOPers who play to not just attend the Townhall meetings Democrats plan on health care but to disrupt them and effectively halt real communication at the meetings. The media — as these media cycles go — will have a new narrative (Obama losing support).
In essence, it’s approaching crunch time and will be a test as to whether Obama and his White House team can reverse a trend. Do they have the skillfull policies, the party unity, and organization to get proposed policies through? Is their highly touted press message prowess vastly overrrated and not working?
The bottom line: Obama’s political capital and clout aren’t what they were two months ago. And if the GOP is indeed returning to a “white voter strategy,” a some suggest nothing in these polls would do anything but encourage the party to keep doin’ what it’s doin — in terms of what it means in polls, at least..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.