As I noted the other day on Facebook, these months are going too quickly, and it is hard to believe that it’s time to do another monthly update of Barack Obama’s polling figures. It’s safe to say that July was not a good month for Mr. Obama by any means, be it due to a backlash to his plan to socialise healthcare, his decision to put himself in the middle of a private dispute between a professor and a cop, turning it in to a national racial debate, or being the bloke in charge when a government program (Cash for Clunkers) had its budget so badly underestimated that it ran out of money within days, throwing buyers and dealers in to a state of confusion.
As always, the figures presented herein are taken from the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll [1].
July saw the raw approval and disapproval lines crossing, so that most of the latter half of the month saw more people disapproving of Obama’s work than approving of it. I should also point out that there was no polling on July 3, 4 or 5 due to the Independence Day holiday.
Data courtesy Rasmussen Reports, LLC [2]
In June we saw the “strongly approve” vs “strongly disapprove” figure, known as the “Rasmussen Approval Index”, cross in to negative territory. In July we saw it in free-fall.
Data courtesy Rasmussen Reports, LLC [2]
As usual, to put this in context, here are the graphs for all of 2009.
Data courtesy Rasmussen Reports, LLC [2]
Data courtesy Rasmussen Reports, LLC [2]
These numbers must be starting to cause some concern for Democrat officials who would be well aware that conservative commentators are pushing for as much of a backlash against the Obama administration in next year’s mid-term elections as possible. On the flipside, those of us on the conservative side of the fence are very pleased that these figures are showing that the gloss has well and truly worn off. Obama is no longer being viewed in terms of his personality, and is instead being judged on his performance.
Samuel