By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
More than half the country supports the job that President Barack Obama is doing at a time when an overwhelming majority of the public is not satisfied with the ways things are going in the nation, the editor in chief of Gallup said Wednesday.
Frank Newport, speaking at the Nassau Club for the annual meeting of the Historical Society of Princeton, shared those and other details and offered historical polling data to make comparisons. He said that only one in four Americans are satisfied with the way things are going. He said that by 50 percent to 49 percent Americans think the next generation is going to have it worse than the current generation.
He called that statistic “another indicator among several that Americans aren’t in a great mood at this point in time when we ask them to talk about how things are going in the U.S.”
Based on polling data from January, he said the economy tops the list for the most important problems facing the country, with the federal budget debt, dissastification with government and unemployment also ranking high. He contrasted those findings with the president now focusing on gun control, immigration and climate change issues that rank low in the polling.
”Those are not issues that pop to the top of our priority issues, although he has public opinion behind him.”
In January, about month after the Newtown school massacre, only 4 percent of Americans rank guns/gun control as their top issue, while one percent listed the environment, he said.
”If the president, the Congress and the Senate were operating right off of public opinion, they would be focusing on problems in their own house, they would be focusing continually on the economy and they would be focusing on what to do about debt,” he said.
As for Mr. Obama, his most recent job approval rating is at 52 percent, according to Gallup polling data from this month. Yet Mr. Newport predicted he’ll face problems moving up in popularity, given the political polarization in the country.
He said that last year, Democrats on average gave the president an 86 percent job approval, compared to 10 percent for Republicans. He said that 76 point gap is tied with Mr. Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, in his fourth year of office.
”We’re in a situation now where Americans are extremely polarized. Their lenses, as it were, are really focused based on their party identification for everything that they look at in life, including the president.”
The public’s approval of its presidents can be fickle, according to historical trend data that Mr. Newport provided. He showed how former President George W. Bush reached the zenith in Gallup polling, at 90 percent job approval rating in late September 2001 after the terror attacks, only to see those numbers plummet into the 20s. The average for all job approvals in Gallup’s history is 55 percent.
Mr. Newport said the presidential job approval rating is “a great barometer of where things are going in American politics today or in American society, because our approval or disapproval of the president often mirrors how we’re feeling about things in general.”
Afterward, Mr. Newport fielded a question about inaccuracies in polling during the last presidential race. He said the industry, as a whole, “did not correctly predict the popular vote.”
He said most, though, had felt Mr. Obama would win the electoral college by looking at state polls.
