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President Barack Obama's approval ratings have dipped below 50 percent for the first time in one prominent poll amid a raft of bad news about the economy and continuing job losses.
The nation's economic woes pushed Obama down to a 49 percent approval rating in the respected Gallup daily tracking poll out Friday. Gallup said Obama's approval rating had been holding in the low 50s since September but hasn't dropped below 50 percent until now.
Obama started out his presidency with 68 percent approval rating in Gallup and saw most of the decline in July and August. One veteran pollster, Syracuse University's Jeffrey Stonecash, said the steep decline is the result of unreasonably inflated expectations about what Obama could accomplish in Washington.
"I'm not surprised by the demise here because the expectations I think were really unrealistic," Stonecash said. "He has huge problems trying to get this morass of the Democratic Party to move and to work to accomplish what he wants. The longer [health care] drags out the more his ratings are going to go down."
Stonecash also said he sees no recovery for Obama's numbers unless and until the economy rebounds. Asked if passage of health care will give the president a boost, the professor said, "No. The economy has got to turn around. Seems to me this is very much like Ronald Reagan in 1980 where he knew the economy was going to cost some members their seats in '82 and he waited, hoping it would come around by the time he faced re-election. Obama's hoping all's going well by the time we get to 2011."
Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said the most recent three-day sweep of tracking data had Obama at 82 percent approval among Democrats, 43 percent among independents and 17 percent among Republicans. "The big erosion from his 60 percent approval levels is coming among independents and Republicans," Newport said.
"Obama's following a fairly standard pattern," Newport said. "Maybe that's the story: that he's no exception, when many thought he'd maintain a very high rating."
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