CNN poll: Obama 1st year a flop, 48%/47%

CNN’s latest poll shows considerable erosion on a wide range of issues for Barack Obama, but nothing more dramatic than the scorecard given by the survey of registered voters.  While Obama gave himself a “good, solid B-plus” for his first year in office, the plurality of Americans gave him a failing grade:

Americans are giving Barack Obama a split decision on his first year in office, according to a new national poll.

Forty-eight percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday say Obama’s presidency has been a failure so far, with 47 percent saying Obama has been a success. The poll’s January 12 release comes just 8 days before Obama marks one year in the White House.

The survey indicates that Obama’s approval rating as president stands at 51 percent, down 3 points from last month, with 48 percent disapproving, up 4 points from December.

For some reason, CNN chose not to reveal the demographics of the sample.  Given that CBS put Obama at a 46% approval rating in its latest poll — and they’re known for using skewed samples on a regular basis — the question of partisan gaps looms rather large.  The results of the poll cannot be considered reliable without knowing whether CNN used a double-digit gap in sampling between Democrats and Republicans, whether any adjustments were made to normalize results, and so on.  Methodology matters.

Let’s put that aside for the moment and look at the rest of the survey.  Obama has lost momentum with voters, with a 14-point drop in strong approval since April.  Even as late as the end of August, Obama had 33% of respondents strongly approving of his performance.  That is now down to 26%, while strong disapproval has grown from 19% in April, 34% in August, to 36% now.  That’s a ten-point deficit, akin to what asmussen has been measuring for months among likely voters.

Obama also has big problems on the issues as well:

• Economy – 44/54, his biggest deficit of the year
• Terrorism – 50/49, down a bit from 52/45 in August and not asked in October
• Health care – 40/59, by far the worst showing of his presidency
• Taxes – 44/53, down from 49/50 in October and 52/43 in September
• Federal budget deficit – 36/62

One big red flag is unemployment.  Obama scored 64/33 on this issue in March after winning the Porkulus battle in Congress.  Now he’s at 45/54, and the unemployment problem is now sticking to him.  The longer it goes, the worse this will get.  After a year in office and a consistent slide in employment, voters aren’t interested in George Bush any longer.  They want to see Obama fix the problem — and are recognizing that he hasn’t.

But the report card will sting the most.  Five months ago, Obama was winning on that question, 51/37.  He has lost 15 points on it since.  That’s because his “inherited” excuse has expired on more than just unemployment.

Update: The headline on this post has caused a little confusion.  Normally, as I do in the rest of the post, I put the approval numbers ahead of the disapproval.  But because I wanted to emphasize the failing grade, I put the fail number ahead of the passing grade in the headline.  I apologize for the confusion, and I should have explained that in the original post.

Blowback