Gallup has good news for President Barack Obama: his approval rating going into the election is 52%. It’s generally believed that an incumbent with an approval rating below 50% is in big trouble:
Fifty-two percent of American adults approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing in Gallup’s tracking survey on Monday, the final such poll to be released before Election Day.The poll shows 45 percent disapprove of Obama’s job performance.
Obama notched a 51 percent approval rating in Gallup’s previous tracking poll last Monday, before the national firm’s operations were suspended due to Superstorm Sandy. He has boasted an approval rating of at least 50 percent in five of the last eight Gallup polls dating back to the tracking period of Oct. 20-22.
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.