New Poll Shows Bush Battered By Gas Prices And Iraq
It’s getting to the point where seemingly every week President George W. Bush’s polling hits a new low — and it’s clear his problem with eroding numbers is no longer just from independent voters but from his own party. The latest from CBS:
With gas prices sky-high and no end of the Iraq war in sight, President George W. Bush’s approval rating hits an all-time low in a new CBS News poll.Only 33 percent approve of his job performance, Mr. Bush’s lowest approval rating yet in CBS News polls. A majority – 58 percent of those polled – say they disapprove of the president. Mr. Bush appears to be losing support from his own party. His approval rating among Republicans has dropped to 68 percent.
Mr. Bush’s ratings are even lower on the issues dominating news coverage: near-record gas prices and the war in Iraq.
The poll found that 74 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the gas crisis. Even more think that the administration has not developed a good plan to get gas prices under control.
The poll also gives Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld his own lowest poll rating yet — and indicates voters think Democrats would be better at keeping gas prices down than Republicans. Not.
One footnote here. If you click on the option to read the full results (it’s in Adobe Acrobat Reader so be forewarned) it’s clear that the polling was done AFTER the recent White House reshuffle that ended in Karl Rove being refocused on helping the GOP keep the Congress and Fox News‘ Tony Snow replacing Scott McClellan as White House press spokesman. That doesn’t portend well for the White House.
Yet another measure (one we look at each day on this site) can be found HERE in the Rasmussen Reports daily poll. It shows you how GWB’s numbers have fluctuated but how he’s stuck with a limited amount of voter support, down 11 percent from the start of his second term. The question: what can Bush do to regain voter support? Those analysts who predict military action on Iran would rally the voters could be wrong here: dissatisfaction seems too profound at this point.
6 Responses to “New Poll Shows Bush Battered By Gas Prices And Iraq”
If you are following the Rasmussen polls, you should look carefully at the fine print in his report today (which you linked to) concerning weighting by Party ID. Rasmussen does it; most polls don’t. As he explained, Rasmussen has been reweighting results to make it appear that the sample had equal numbers of R and D respondents, as they did at the last election. That is the main reason why Rasmussen results have recently been much better for the Pres, and why the 11% drop would have been greater without this artifice. Now he is updating the weighting basis to reflect reasonably current realities, so there will be a sustained drop in his figures from now on.
Another point about Rasmussen is that he undercounts Independents. I don’t know if his new re-weighting will reflect the rise in Independents over the last year (former Republicans mostly). But since Indies view Bush almost as negatively as do Democrats, undercounting Independents tends to make Bush look higher. It’ll be interesting to see what his partisan ID looks like going forward.
With the recent revelations about Bush’s use of signing statements to “clarify” his interpretation of up to 750 laws, this is bound to go no higher.
As we are now living with the effects of Bush’s bungled military invasion of Iraq, I highly doubt that planning military action in Iran would raise his standing in the polls. My guess is the source of disillusionment among Independents (former Republicans) is partly due to his manipulation of pre-war intelligence, three years of hearing overly optimistic reports concerning our efforts against the insurgency, and the huge deficits which the war effort, along with the administration’s tax cuts, has created.
A military response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions is even more complicated than removing Sadaam Hussein, and it doesn’t help that we are receiving very limited support from the international community. Bush’s base remains, the faithful diehards that really believe in his vision, but in my opinion, if the neocons made such huge mistakes in Iraq, why should anyone trust them in Iran, where the stakes are even higher??
The ex-Republicans jumped ship because of Iraq and the deficit. They earnestly believed the Republican Party was the party of competence on national security and conservative small government. They won’t become Democrats, but they might vote for the “right” Democrat (like Mark Warner?) and they won’t back the Republicans until the party jettisons the whole Bush clan. All Bush will have left are fundamentalist Christians who reject reason as a matter of pride.
Elrod-you are right—Conservative Republicans are angry over the huge growth in the bureaucracy, and Bush’s stand on border issues and what they see as amnesty. Moderate Republicans are upset about gas prices and Iraq. The evangelicals still believe in Bush because of blind trust, and I think military families, as a whole, still support him .
I think that publicly,Republican candidates are distancing themselves as much as possible from the president, but behind the scenes don’t mind taking the campaign money that Bush, Cheney, Rove, and even Laura Bush are raising for them.