Much was written in the press a few weeks ago when President Obama’s job approval rating in the Gallup poll sunk back into the low 40s. Analysis indicated that his popularity, and influence, are at a low ebb. This spate of articles was consistent with the journalistic trend of the last year, where piece after piece have come out associating Obama’s second-term decline in popularity with that of his predecessor, the near-universally reviled George W. Bush. Few serious analysts have come out and said that Obama is now just as unpopular as Bush was, but many take the tone that even if Obama isn’t quite as reviled as Bush, their unpopular second-terms are somewhere in the same category of public esteem. The latest of these headlines came on Wednesday, when Chris Cilizza reported that "Most Americans Say Obama Is the Worst President Since World War II."
Avid Obama supporter that I am, I can’t let this slide.Fortunately, polls don’t just ask about Presidential approval ratings; each year, Gallup also takes a measure of Americans’ level of confidence in 15 public institutions, ranging from Congress and SCOTUS, to public schools and the police force, to big business.* Right now, Americans’ confidence in each and every one of these institutions is at or near a record low.
To get a better understanding of Obama’s popularity relative to these institutions, I averaged the public’s confidence in institutions for each year that there was data (the Gallup started asking these questions in 1973). Then I averaged each president’s job approval rating for each year that Gallup had institutions data, and looked at the difference each year between the individual president’s approval rating, and citizens’ collective confidence in America’s major institutions as a whole.
After looking at the data, two things became clear:
1) Americans' trust in our society's shaping institutions is at an all-time low.
2) Relative to society's other major institutions, President Obama is reasonably popular as compared the preceding seven US presidents.
See the graph below for detail. The further above a dot is from the line, the more popular that year's president relative to major public institutions.
Obama's approval rating has, on average, been 14 percentage points higher than Americans' confidence in major institutions. This compares favorably to Bill Clinton (15%), George W. Bush, (10%), and Ronald Reagan (10%). Obama has maintained solid-to-good popularity, even as we head into the last quarter of his time in office. We don't have a lot of data on Americans' confidence in institutions during the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, but they were all considerably less popular than their successors by this measure.
With Americans' trust in institutions sinking to historic lows, I posit that we are entering an era of politics akin to the "dead ball era" of Major League Baseball in the early 20th century, when the balls were so heavy and mucked up that it was almost impossible for even the best hitters to hit many home runs. Similarly, so long as our confidence in our institutions remains so low, or continues to sink, presidents will struggle to keep their job approval ratings above water for more than a few months at a time.
The fact that Obama has retained an approval rating hovering in the low to mid 40s, while almost every other public institution has the confidence of only around 30% of the public, is a testament to the regard with which most Americans still hold him. I would go so far as to say that, even many of poll respondents who say that they disapprove of his job performance said so because they understand that he has been unable to achieve his goals in the face of really difficult circumstances, not because they don’t like him personally, or what he was trying to do in the first place.
Obama’s unpopularity has been a major story for pundits in the last year. I think the bigger story is the personal popularity the President has retained in what is a toxic political environment for all of society’s major institutions.
Meaningful comparisons should assume a level playing field. Obama's public is way more prone to be suspicious of society's big, shaping institutions than the public faced by any of the last eight presidents. Analysts should consider this fact when comparing Obama's popularity against history.
*To aggregate Americans' confidence in public institutions, I have included their level of confidence in each of the following for the years data was available: Church / Religion, the Military, the Supreme Court, Banks, Public Schools, Newspapers, Congress, TV News, Organized Labor, the Presidency, the police, the Medical System, the Criminal Justice System, and Big Business.