Much has been made about the precipitous slide of President Obama's approval ratings -- a 17-point drop in just eight months, according to Gallup. The New York Times' David Brooks wrote recently that "no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast." While the pace of a president's slide is important, it's how low he slides -- and whether he can get back -- that matters more.
First, it's important to put Obama's current approval rating in context. His 51 percent showing essentially equals his winning margin in the election. If this were a house or a stock, we'd argue that he was overvalued for the last few months and is now back to his fair market value.
It's also important to note that while President Clinton's post-honeymoon slump was slightly less dramatic (he dropped 14 points between January and August of 1993), he ended the month of August at 44 percent -- a much more dangerous place for any incumbent. And while President Reagan was at 60 percent in mid-August of 1981, his ratings would drop 11 points in just four months -- a much steeper slide than Obama's. By December, Reagan was at 49 percent, and he wouldn't hit the 50 percent threshold again until November 1983.
Will it be enough for Obama if things just don't get any worse?
That this summer's debate on health care has been hard on Obama and his party is an understatement. Yet it's difficult to believe that health care will still dominate the political landscape a year from now. A recent Pew poll found a huge jump in the number of people who saw health care as the most important issue facing the U.S. -- from 3 percent in February to 20 percent this month. Given how quickly this issue jumped in relevance, it's easy to theorize that it will fall just as fast once it's no longer consuming Washington and those who cover Washington.
Instead, it's the economy that will determine the fate of Obama's approval ratings and his party's prospects in 2010. To be sure, there aren't any economists out there talking about a rip-roaring recovery in 2010. But will it be enough for Obama if things just don't get any worse?
The economy, in particular the nation's high unemployment rate, was to blame for Reagan's dismal midterms in 1982 -- his party lost 26 seats that year. In November of 1980, the unemployment rate had been 7.5 percent, and it remained relatively flat through most of 1981. But by the end of that year it started to pick up, and it peaked in the fall of 1982 -- just as voters were headed to the polls -- at 10.8 percent.
Obama was inaugurated with unemployment at nearly the exact rate it was when Reagan came into office (7.5 percent), but it climbed quickly over his first few months. That's the bad news. The "good" news is that there's also a good chance that it will peak this year and start dropping in 2010. Of course, just how low it goes -- or how low voters are expecting it to go -- is another story. Unemployment was at 10 percent for over 10 months in 1982-83 and didn't go back under 8 percent until early 1984. If that pattern holds this time around, it won't be until June of 2010 that unemployment starts to go down.
So who wins if 2010 is a referendum on whether voters are better off today than they were two years ago? With the obvious caveat that a lot can happen in the next 14 months, the answer may very well be all about semantics instead of statistics. Democrats' job will be to convince voters that while things aren't great, they'd be much worse without their interventions. Republicans, meanwhile, are hoping that voters will see unemployment, a rising deficit and government spending as a sure sign that Democrats have led the country on the wrong track.
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