A new Gallup poll continues to suggest these are troubled days for President George Bush:
PRINCETON, NJ — A new Gallup Poll finds a decline in George W. Bush’s job approval rating. After standing at 49% approval in the prior two CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls conducted this month, now just 44% of Americans say they approve of Bush, a new low mark for the president.
The poll also shows a drop in Bush’s favorable rating to 48%, which is the first time it has dropped below 50% since Gallup began tracking this opinion in 1999.
Four in 10 Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the country, which is essentially unchanged from early July. The poll shows continued positive momentum for the Democratic Party in terms of national party identification and ratings of the two major political parties, both of which were evident before the drop in Bush approval occurred.
The July 25-28 Gallup Poll finds 44% of Americans approving and 51% disapproving of the job Bush is doing as president. Bush’s prior low approval rating was 45%, which occurred once in March and once again in June of this year.
Gallup notes that earlier this month Bush’s numbers went up, probably due to the London terrorist attacks and the terrorist attack in Egypt. And it notes this:
A closer look at the data reveals that Bush’s recent approval ratings were higher because of independents’ more positive evaluations, which have now returned to their late June levels. Republicans’ and Democrats’ evaluations of Bush have been more sable in recent weeks.
The bottom line is that Bush is not doing well with independents. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: WATCH the independents.
Yes, Karl Rove did a “mobilization” election strategy where the GOP tried to rally its troops and get them all to the polls, rather than craft a campaign around garnering independent voters’ votes as swing voters. But if you look at the final results Bush could not have won without some Democratic and independent support. John Kerry ran an incompetent and tedious campaign. Post-election polling results showed that some Democrats and independents looked at Kerry and said “No way.”
So the question now becomes: does this mini-coalition that helped elect Bush in 2004 survive or does it reconstitute? If Bush and the GOP ultimately lose independents, who then replaces those voters? It’s still too early to tell — but the overall trend of Bush’s numbers are not upward.
And, we now predict, should he veto a stem cell research bill that comes out of Congress (which would now be a bill supported by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist), his numbers will go down even more — and faster.
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.