Politics

Gallup: Obama Low In Popularity Among Modern Presidents [Updated]

220px-Richard_NixonPresident_Barack_ObamaThere was considerable coverage about the high popularity of President Barack Obama as he left office — often in comparison with the dropping polls of President Trump.  However, the White House pushed back on what it considered misleading poll stories.  Now Gallup may support the position of the White House — at least on the average of the Obama numbers.  Most polls show a surge of support at the end of Obama’s term.  Gallup shows Obama at relatively low polling numbers on average in comparison to past presidents.  This does not compare the polling at the time of his departure.  Indeed, even Nixon showed better polling numbers.  However, another poll this week shows Obama as just behind Reagan as the country’s greatest president.

The Gallup poll shows the following ranking since World War II:

  1.  Kennedy – 70.1%
  2. Eisenhower – 65%
  3. G.H.W. Bush – 60.9%
  4. Clinton – 55.1%
  5. Johnson – 55.1
  6. Reagan – 52.8%
  7. G.W. Bush – 49.4%
  8. Nixon – 49%
  9. Obama – 47.9%
  10. Ford – 47.2%
  11. Carter – 45.5%
  12. Truman – 45.4%

Only three presidents scored worse than Obama since Gallup started doing these surveys in 1945: never-elected Gerald Ford (47.2%), one-termer Jimmy Carter (45.4%), and Harry Truman (45.4%).

That means that only three presidents (Ford, Carter, and Truman) had lower polling numbers.

These polls can be obviously questionable on their conclusions like the greatest president determination.  The Quinnipiac University poll found 29 percent favoring Obama as opposed to  30 percent who cite Ronald Reagan.  That is not overwhelming.  Besides everyone knows that Madison is the greatest president.  That is the result of my personal poll which found that one out of every one professor in my home voted for Madison.

140 thoughts on “Gallup: Obama Low In Popularity Among Modern Presidents [Updated]”

  1. OH, I forgot. What was the Dow index at when Obama came into office and what was it on the day he left? That was 8 years but I recall that the rise in stock prices has been more than double. Something like 9,000 to 20,000. Those are some numbers.

  2. Independent Bob already said what I was thinking. I would add: Where was Gallup on Election Eve? I would bet that they thought Hillary would win the Electoral College.

    Poll, Poll, nuthin but trolls.

  3. How can anyone believe any of this anymore? I don’t doubt Professor Turley or Ron Paul. That’s about it though.

  4. Pingback: Gallup: Obama Low In Popularity Among Modern Presidents Updated | JONATHAN TURLEY | Freedom & Liberty Blog

    1. Polls are meaningless unless they happen on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November” in a government sanctioned voting booth.

      1. No, they’re not meaningless. They just don’t interest you for whatever purposes you have.

          1. There are people who want to understand the contours of their social world. Survey research is a tool toward that end.

  5. Gallup publishes comparative figures which track all post-war presidents longitudinally and cross-sectionally. Obama was underwater with the public (approval ratings below 50%) pretty consistently from May of 2010 to March of 2016, bar the period running from Sept. 2012 to March 2013. Up until recent weeks, Gallup’s interactive utility allowed you to view a line graph which plotted the median approval rating their set of presidents enjoyed at given points in time after their inauguration (all 12 were in office at least 850 days, all but two at least 1,460 days; and 6 of 12 at least 2,830 days) Obama’s assessed approval ratings were consistently below that median. Curiously, they’ve removed that data from their site and made it more difficult to find the data which allows you to view comparative line graphs of different president’s approval ratings.

    Obama never closed the deal with the public. One oddity has been that he had a high floor ~39% of the public), higher than Jimmy Carter and higher than any Republican president post-Eisenhower. I suspect that’s because voting Democratic is an identity affirmation for much larger swaths of their electorate than is the case with Republicans and because the media has been an extension of the Administration in a way no previous president enjoyed bar Kennedy. (Brent Bozell has said his center’s content analysis of the media in the Clinton era showed a sharp distinction between the print media, which kept some professional distance from the administration, and broadcast media, which functioned as an extension of it. Jody Powell maintained Jimmy Carter had no constituency in the media (something that comports with my memory of the era, FWIW)).

    1. Carter was anti establishment, as is Trump. Dems have always treated Carter like a red headed stepchild. Seen him @ any Dem conventions lately? And while the MSM never hated Carter like they do Trump, they did not perform daily fellatio like they did for Obama, or even Clinton. There is a revolution underway in the Western world. The MSM is one of the biggest victims. They are just too stupid and smug to realize it yet.

      1. A true fascist government seeks to destroy a press that does not accommodate them press and and oppositional parties. That is what we are seeing.

  6. Polls. As Mespo says, Lies, damn lies, and statistics polls. Polls are interesting somewhat in the same manner as a long term weather report. There is probably some meaning in there, somewhere, if one has a degree in statistical probability, the complete question set and list of respondents, locations, time of day asked, physical context – phone, in person, and so on, and one is willing to spend the time to root around in it all.

    One of the modern problems is that most of these polls are taken by land line phone. Who has a land line phone now-a-days? Well, err…, I do. But I never answer it directly and never ever call back pollsters. Millions of others no longer even have land line anymore and their smart phones are configured to screen out questionable calls. So we start out on the shaky ground of who is being polled and just how representative are they and it goes down hill from there.

    What were the chances Nate Silver, king of statistics, gave for Hillary? They ranged from 90 to 60 percent or something thereabouts but he never saw Trump’s batman POW coming… Hard to use Nate, or anyone else for that matter, to bolster the accuracy of polls.

    ——————————————————

    But if one wants to use polls simply as a starting point for discussion, and to hell with whether or not they mean anything, then I couldn’t agree more that Obama richly deserves any weak poll numbers he may have gotten upon expiration of his term as President.

    While mouthing populist mantras he leaves the average middle class individual in deep financial trouble. Over 90% of his oft touted JOBS being part time work at horribly low paying jobs like burger flipping. Unions being more corrupt than ever. His signature piece of health care legislation but a sop to profligate insurance companies and the whole notion of government being able to force it’s citizens into coercive relations with private enterprise. His financial ball out but a bitter memory of giving banksters enormous bail outs while allowing millions of home owners to be thrown out on the street – men, women, and children alike. A military expansion in the middle east that has done absolutely nothing but destroy regimes, legitimate and illigitimate alike for purely US economic interests (at least perceived ones) and create a gigantic humanitarian crisis as a side effect, not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians being killed, all in the shadowy name of continuing the war on terror that his predecessor ramped up largely for non existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As they say, what’s not to like?

    It is true that any polls for Trump at this point are so premature as to be ridiculous other than to admit the obvious; that this was a race between two deeply flawed and unpopular candidates.

  7. Obama was popular when he left. Trump’s angry so Gallup does an analysis of Obama’s average popularity and then this “supports” the WH. apples hello oranges. Not that I really care but good grief. Someone needs to get a thicker skin!

    1. Justice Holmes – Obama was the fourth least popular President as he went out the door. Even Nixon had better numbers.

      1. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/314492-poll-obama-leaves-office-with-58-favorability ”
        Poll: Obama leaves office with 58 percent favorability
        © Greg Nash

        “President Obama will leave the White House with a 58 percent favorability rating, a new poll finds.

        A Gallup poll conducted two weeks before Obama leaves office found that more than half of Americans view the president favorably.

        Obama reached his peak favorability rating of 78 percent before his own inauguration in January 2009, according to Gallup. He averaged 53 percent favorability over his two terms in the White House.

        Obama’s final marks before he leaves office exceed that of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who departed with a 40 percent favorability. Bill Clinton had a 57 percent rating before he left office, just one point less than Obama’s. George H.W. Bush left the White House in January 1993 with a 62 percent rating.

        Gallup first began measuring presidential ratings using the favorable vs. unfavorable format in 1992”. That is the final poll for Obama. i don’t really care but since some are bent on distorting the numbers from the final poll I am publishing it..

          1. Okay, thanks. most are close . H W Bush stayed pretty popular but ended up losing the election.

            1. He didn’t. His numbers careered downhill from January 1991 to June 1992 and he was way underwater with the public at that time.

        1. Gallup has in recent years been publishing historical data on presidential approval which can be accessed with an interactive utility. Their data set extends back to 1947.

          Only Eisenhower and Kennedy had consistenty buoyant approval ratings. Johnson, Carter, Bush the Elder, and Bush the Younger experienced a secular decay in their standing with the public (with a good deal of week-to-week flux). They started high and ended low (although you see a brief spike at the but-end of most administrations). Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton had sort of a sine wave with troughs near mid-term elections. Nixon’s approval was tanking his last 18 months while Reagan’s and Clinton’s were improving. Ford and Obama had consistently blah approval ratings, with the nadir for Ford at the 7 month mark and the nadir for Obama at the 34 month mark.

          1. Addendum: Harry Truman’s standing fluctuated wildly but was on a general downward trajectory during his time in office.

            What’s curious would be retrospective approval. Kennedy consistently tops the list, even though his administration was less than 3 years in duration, he had only one discrete accomplishment worth bothering about, and he was a disgusting human being. (He was handed a good economic and financial situation by the previous administration and managed not to injure the economy or public finance).

            1. Not totally knowledgeable about that time (I was getting ready to slide into the world when he was shot), seems to me the most important thing he did, which may have been the most important thing ever, was keeping a cool head during the missile crisis. The fact that we’re still here says he must have done pretty good with that. I’ll give him a pretty good grade for that. Just glad I didn’t have a daughter down there at the time though.

      3. “Gallup shows Obama at relatively low polling numbers on average in comparison to past presidents. This does not compare the polling at the time of his departure”

    1. They’re having trouble building proper sampling frames with the demise of landline phones. They could go back to door-to-door canvassing, which is how it was done in 1947 when Gallup began asking questions. That’s expensive and time consuming, however, and you cannot complete many polls.

      1. That’s a very good point and most likely explains why polls are all over the place (other than the veracity of the pollers, which I have no knowledge of).

  10. By a far margin, Obama was the most doctrinaire president, at least in my lifetime. It is, unsurprising, therefore, that he was the most polarizing president since polling on that issue began. Ideology divides, practicality unites. There are, however, a couple of facets to the Gallup poll which explain the poll’s results.

    First, Gallup, once the most reliable of the polls, has fallen on hard times. Gallup does not appear to be as accurate as other polls in recent elections. As a long time believer in Gallup, I must reluctantly concede that the poll may not be totally reliable.

    Second, in analyzing approval ratings between Democrats and Republicans over time, we must recall the demize of the Southern Democrat, the anachronistic appendage of the Democratic party RIP circa 1980. Southern Democrats often voted with Republicans on various issues, especially foreign policy issues. They would, therefore, often approve of the actions of a Republican president. The result would be that more Democrats would approve of a Republican president then than now.

    All that is to say, we are definitely a more polarized nation than at any time since the Vietnam War.

    1. I think Reagan was the most doctrinaire, though I’d say ‘principled’ as ‘doctrinaire’ has a pejorative vibe. Reagan had devoted decades to pondering topical questions and changed his opinion on a great many. Obama strikes me as a manifestation of a type, who reflects what’s abroad in the sort of social circles in which he travels. He has the worldview of the deputy dean of students at some place like Oberlin.

  11. Are these the same people who predicted a Clinton electoral college landslide?

  12. This reminds me. When I was growing up Ike was taught as an idiot, Truman was finally coming back as something other than some rube who accidentally became president. As of today Eisenhower is generally being taught as an extremely capable and wise president, one of our best.

    1. Eisenhower was never considered an idiot, except by a thin sliver of the word-merchant sector.

  13. The Right: “Don’t trust the polls.”

    A favorable poll comes out: “Look, look, look!”

    2. Gallup’s approval tracking incorporates a weekly poll, so the longitudinal set has hundreds of polls incorporated within it.

  14. Rasmussen has been polling Trump at 59%. Everytime he fulfills a pledge he gains a few points.

    1. I’ve seen 36% to 46%. And every lie (is there anything with the liar trump?) even sane Americans are questioning his:

      Lock her up – while he (and his staff) uses unsecured devices – talk about kicking Americans in their backsides

      Mexico will pay for the wall – an import tariff means American consumers will pay

      largest inaguration crowd ever – like his hands, tiny, tiny, tiny – oh and seemiingly smaller then the next day anti-trump women’s march

      largest voter fraud – he is already working on spending millions to back stop the lie regarding multiple

      registrations while omitting his guilty daughter, staff such mnuchin, spicer, Bannon, etc…… or maybe he means Willard Romney stating he lives in his brothers basement to vote in Massachusets, or Pat Roberts multiple primary residences, Liz Cheney, etc……………..

      personally enriching himself

      Ties to Russia

      Trump easily has already secured the moniker of the oval offices’ biggest liar ever. Please raise a toast to your god (he is in his mind).

      4. Bill W, I buy a lot of avocados and bananas. Trump is going to raise the price of produce by at least twenty percent with that stupid wall. Can’t imagine that tax will be good for his dismal approval ratings or anything else.

        1. Totally agree Joe. And even without he liar Trump’s anti trade policies, commodities prices have already jumped benefiting his billionaire cabinet. Sadly, for ALL Americans the liar Trump will be bad for all but the swampiest.

          As for government correspondence on private, ILLEGAL sources, are you surprised by republican duplicity? Wonder when we’ll ever hear about the South Dakota ethics here?

          btw Paul – understand the truth is tough. And as you often say please show us the link for your 59% approval? and that it is going up as he disses the intelligence community, tells us about “clean, beautiful coal (oh c’mon, even the totally partisan has to know that is 100% a lie), etc…….? Not that Rasmussen polls are honest anyway.

          1. You Democrats keep the pointless beatings up on the Russians and moving tanks and missiles up to their border, you’re going to get a quick realignment of ethics. More tyranny of the progressives.

              1. Polls mespo says have no meaning indicate that > 60% of the Mexican public fancy they have a right to settle in the United States at their discretion and that immigration control on our part violates their rights. They are properly disabused of this illusion. If they think that being compelled to respect American immigration law and cross the border with authorization at designated points of entry is a beating administered to them, that’s regrettable. Someone being unreasonable is not a reason for the U.S. to adopt bad policy.

        2. Trump is going to raise the price of produce by at least twenty percent with that stupid wall.

          You fancy we should have unlimited illegal immigration so you can have cheaper avocados and bananas? Is this a parody?

          1. Well, if they respond in kind and slap the tariff on our ag products, thinks won’t look so rosy for the farmers in Iowa that voted for Trump, either. I used avocados as an example but the results are far reaching.

                1. Per the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau, gross output of agricultural products amounted to $446 bn in 2015, of which $10.5 bn (2.35%) were exported to Mexico. I suspect Iowa farmers will survive.

  15. And what, pray tell, are the error margins? Without that one cannot tell which of the percentages are actually different.

    Lawyers should stick to the law and leave this sort of stuff to the statisticians.

    1. The margin of error in a political Gallup poll is designed to be about 3% in each case, so each of the results shown for those presidents is comparable. The sample size necessary to get that margin of error is in the 1,000 range, given a 95% confidence level (often called a z factor). That 95% confidence level means that if they were to repeat the polling process again 100 times, selecting a different group of about 1,000 people, 95 out of 100 samples would fall within that 3% margin of error, i.e., 47.9% +/- 3% in Obama’s case.

      The z factor for 95% is 1.96. So, in Obama’s case the formula is as follows.

      Margin of error = 1.96 * (square root of (.479 * .521)) / (square root of 1,000) = 3%

      That “.479” was Obama’s favorability rating and the “.521” is equal to (1-.479).

      This ends today’s statistics lession.

  16. All the lying MSM (esp NYT) who call Trump and his team liars…Look at the quotes when lying Bill Clinton was caught lying under oath (perjury). They used terms like “mislead…obfuscated,” etc., but never called him a liar, even though he plead to perjury and lost his law license forever.

    Rep. starts one or two wars: “warmonger.” Dem Obama is the first POTUS to spend every single day of his eight years fighting wars, including starting his own war in Syria: he wins Nobel Peace Price his first day in office.

    Obama lies through his teeth. Bill Clinton convicted of perjury: “mislead.” Trump exaggeration: “liar, liar, pants on fire!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

    1. LOL! I am happy to see you made this comment because it’s exactly what I first thought to write.

  18. I feel rotten how the poll makes me think most of what Harvey Dent told us in The Dark Knight.

  19. On that subject….or something…Hillary thinking of starting a liberal show on TV or something. She could call it Air America and do it through satellites or something. Here’s a tip. People that lie look down and to the right and blink a lot. So TV is not as good as radio. However the left is very bad at radio because it involves having a vocabulary and making word pictures. The letists are better at visual so she could call it cRap America. No problem funding. Soros has 20 billion left and Peter Lewis his partner in crime ..make that ‘time’ about half that and they only need to cover the California, New York and …..or something market.

  20. I gave him top marks for abdicating. Now if we could just get him to stay on the Golf course and out of sight. Hillary could caddie. Is that female speak for cad?

    1. I’m so happy to wake up every morning and the first thing that comes to mind: “NO OBAMA; NO HILLARY”. What a great country we live in. Each day, President Trump moves America toward fulfilling the promises to keep our country safe, increased jobs, lower taxes, improved health care, and real TRANSPARENCY. Draining the Swamp? Four of the Alligators ran out of the Swamp yesterday!. I haven’t been this happy since my wedding day over two decades ago. And Hillary as a Caddie? Could you make her wear one of those Golf Caps with MAGA on it?

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