Americans at odds over President's job performance
Americans remain sharply divided when it comes to the job President Barack Obama has done in his first months in office, a new Zogby Interactive telephone hybrid survey shows. Half of Americans give Obama's job performance a positive rating, with 26% rating his job as "excellent" and 24% rating it as "good." But nearly as many give Obama a negative job performance rating, with 14% who say he is doing a "fair" job as president and 35% who say he is doing a "poor" job. (Zogby uses a four-point scale of excellent, good, fair and poor, and aggregates excellent and good to determine positive ratings.)
This most recent hybrid poll shows little change from an exclusively online poll conducted in late May and early June which showed Obama's positive job performance numbers at 51%, down a point from mid-April. That poll showed 14% gave Obama a rating of fair and 36% poor. The Zogby International hybrid telephone/online survey of 3,728 likely voters nationwide was conducted from June 12-18, 2009, and includes 3,133 interviews completed interactively and 595 interviews conducted by telephone. The margin of error is +/- 1.6 percentage points. Republicans (69%), McCain voters (70%), and conservatives (75%) are most likely to give Obama a "poor" rating in this latest survey, while about half of Democrats (49%), Obama voters (47%), and liberals (51%) believe the President has done an "excellent" job so far. When asked specifically if overall, they approve or disapprove of Obama's job as president, 51% of likely voters approve while 42% disapprove. Another 7% are not sure. Pollster John Zogby: "No matter which you cut it - four-way scale or two-way scale - Obama's approval numbers have taken a bit of a hit. Looking at it closely this should not be surprising with lots of crises all requiring attention and solutions all at once and an opposition ready to stir up criticism and fear about the unknown - and there is plenty that is unknown. Polling showing that two in five Americans identify themselves as conservative. And expectations are high to do something, though there is little agreement on how to do it, and a congressional system that is on automatic hyper-partisan pilot. Frankly, it is a wonder that any President is doing as well. His personal favorability continues to prop him up." Click here to join the discussion (6/26/2009)