I told you it was coming and now here it is.
His all-time low in Gallup is … 38 percent, which he reached twice in late summer and fall 2011 before rebounding. This is why I thought it was noteworthy last week when his favorable rating ended up negative for the first time in that WSJ/NBC poll. He’s had dips in job approval before but retained his personal popularity with voters. People liked him even when they thought he was doing a bad job, which I think provided a floor for his overall approval rating. I’m not sure that floor is there anymore. He’s had a horrendously bad month, from the shutdown to the Healthcare.gov nightmare to the new wrinkles about NSA spying to, of course, the fiasco of “if you like your plan” having been exposed as a grand lie. If you supported Obama before because you thought he’d be an omnicompetent best-and-brightest liberal technocrat, your image of him has been shattered by the Healthcare.gov rollout. If you supported Obama before because you thought he was a straight-shooting hopey-changey fighter for the middle class, your image of him now has to be reconciled with the fact that millions of middle-class people are being forced into more expensive coverage and that O lied, lied, lied his ass off about it for three years. I said it in the WSJ/NBC post and I’ll say it again: Given the amount of crap raining on him, he’s lucky to be as high as 39 percent. If the website can’t be fixed this month and he’s forced to do something drastic like delaying the law for six months, some liberals will abandon him too and he’ll end up in the low 30s. And yes, even a lame duck’s approval rating matters:
If Obama's job approval were to be -14 on Election Day 2014, Rs would almost certainly gain seats. Big if.
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) November 5, 2013
It’s -14 today, a full year removed from the midterms. Where will it be in October 2014, a month removed, when the new, almost certainly higher insurance rates for 2015 are released?
I have no new Obama video for this post so here’s Toronto Mayor Rob Ford admitting that he’s smoked crack in the past. Approval rating: 43 percent.
Update: Latinos are big supporters of ObamaCare under normal circumstances, but a month of Glitchpalooza and lies about people keeping their plans isn’t “normal circumstances.” He’s at 49 percent now, down nine points since the week before.
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