Obama drops to new low of 39% in Marist poll

You know, call me crazy, but it sure doesn’t appear that President Obama’s jobs bill did much for his popularity.  A new poll from Marist conducted a few days after Obama’s big joint-session jobs speech/NFL pregame show has Obama’s job-approval rating at its lowest ever in the Marist series at 39% (via William Amos):

President Barack Obama faces a litany of bad news.  The president’s job approval rating, his favorability, and his rating on the economy have hit all-time lows.  To compound matters, three in four Americans still believe the nation is in a recession and the proportion who thinks the country is moving in the wrong direction is at its highest point in more than a decade.

Other than that, though, things are just groovy.

According to this McClatchy-Marist Poll, the president’s approval rating is at 39% among registered voters nationally, an all-time low for Mr. Obama.  For the first time a majority — 52% — disapproves of the job he is doing in office, and 9% are unsure.

“President Obama needs to reboot his presidency,” says Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, Director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.  “Although numbers like these typically spell doom for an incumbent’s re-election prospects, the Republicans in Congress and eventually his GOP opponent could still provide Obama with running room.”

The jobs-bill speech was supposed to be the reboot.  Obama wanted the grandest possible venue in order to lay out his vision of economic stimulus, and Obama got exactly what he wanted.  Four days after the event, Obama got his answer, which makes a dead-cat bounce look pretty darned good now.

The news actually gets worse.  Obama gets an abysmal 32/57 job approval rating among independent voters, down from 38% the month before.  He’s down to 71% among Democrats now, which isn’t exactly a robust vote of confidence. Obama’s numbers on the economy continue to sour as well, only getting 33/61 approval on this issue, with disapproval among indies up to 69% now.  That’s down from 37/59 in June.

But the favorability numbers are more telling.  He’s now underwater on personal favorability for the first time at 46/48.  He lost ten points on this measure among independents in the last month, falling from 50% to 40%.  His personal favorability has been his Teflon, but it’s eroding fast now.

And the piece de resistance?  The sample used by Marist gives Democrats an eight-point advantage, 34/26/39.  That undersamples Republicans by a significant amount — Obama won the popular vote in 2008 by seven points in a political environment much more friendly to Democrats than now.  Imagine what job-approval rating a realistic sample would produce.

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