How Low Can It Go?

Following up on yesterday’s post, reader ZH asked some reasonable questions about presidential approval ratings:

How low does a president’s approval rating get, realistically speaking? What is the lowest recorded rating ever?  How about in recent memory?

Back in March, the Gallup Organization’s Jeffrey Jones did some analysis showing that presidential approval has sometimes fallen below 30% on their surveys:

Four presidents hit bottom below the 30% approval level — Harry Truman (23%), Richard Nixon (24%), Jimmy Carter (28%), and the elder George Bush (29%). Four others bottomed out below 40% — Lyndon Johnson (35%), Gerald Ford (37%), Ronald Reagan (35%), and Bill Clinton (37%). Kennedy’s low point was 56%; Eisenhower’s, 49%.

Most presidents’ low approval ratings can be attributed to events that were demonstrably not going well for the United States — specifically, the Korean War for Truman, the Vietnam War and racial tensions for Johnson, imminent impeachment for Nixon over the Watergate scandal, the energy crisis for Carter, and flagging economies for Ford, Reagan, and Bush the elder.

Also of note is that Johnson’s and the elder Bush’s low points came in polls completed just after the opposition parties held their presidential nominating conventions, which likely served to focus the nation’s attention on its problems and to lay the blame for those squarely on the president’s shoulders.

The Gallup analysis, which also includes complete results for the “low” for each president along with field dates, is available to paid subscribers only. 

Approval ratings for governors and other offices has been known to fall even lower.  For example, the most recent job ratings for Ohio Governor Robert Taft were 15% and 17% respectively on polls by the Columbus Dispatch and SurveyUSA.   Taft’s free fall to that level occurred in part because his approval among Republicans collapsed to only 25%. 

So another way to think about how low the President’s numbers could go is to consider Bush’s support among Republicans.   The overwhelming majority of those that now approve of his performance are either identify as Republicans or tell pollsters they are independents who “lean” Republican (see the IPSOS crosstabs).  For Bush’s numbers to fall much further, he will need to lose significant support from Republicans. 

So far, at least, any such erosion has been minimal.  The most recent survey report from the Pew Research Center included the following chart showing the trend in presidential approval over the year.

The Pew report concluded:

The president continues to draw strong support from Republicans, 81% of whom approve of the job he is doing. But that number reflects an eight-point decline since January, with most of that drop occurring in late summer. Among independents, a plurality of 47% approved of Bush’s performance in January; now just 34% do so. Approval among Democrats is now in the single digits (9%), down from 17% in January.

MP also cobbled together results by party where available from the six pollsters that released surveys in the last week.  Remember, we are looking at relatively small sample sizes (hundreds of interviews, not thousands) with more random varation, but the overall pattern is consistent with the results reported by Pew (source links:  USAToday/Gallup, Fox, Pew, WSJ/NBC, AP-IPSOS & CBS).   Bush shows an average 80% support from Republicans across the six surveys.   

MP could find only two of these organizations, other than Pew, that characterized the trend in the job approval rating by party over the last month.  Both indicate that for now at least, Bush’s support from Republicans is holding at roughly 80%:

CBS:  Those in [Bush’s] own party are still overwhelmingly positive about his performance (nearly 80 percent approve), but the president receives little support from either Democrats or Independents. And while views of President Bush have lately not changed much among Republicans or Democrats, his approval rating among Independents has dropped 11 points since just last month, from 40 percent to 29 percent now.

USAToday (Gallup):  Bush’s fall, from a 45% approval rating in late September, is largely due to a drop in support among independents and Democrats. His approval among independents declined to 32% from 37% since the last USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Sept. 26-28. Approval among Democrats fell to 8% from 15%.

Bush’s approval among his Republican base continues to hold firm. It was 85% in the previous poll and 84% in the latest, steady support that’s preventing him from falling lower.