President Obama’s middling job approval rating has been quite steady over the last few months, devoid of much movement outside of the relatively subtle shifts seen from poll to poll. This is nothing new: Based on Gallup’s polling, Barack Obama’s approval rating has the smallest standard deviation of any modern […] Read more »
New research shows just how much presidents try to manipulate public opinion
The political scientists James Druckman and Lawrence Jacobs have just published a book, “Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation.” Early reviews call it “a breakthrough” and “a fascinating study” whose “picture is not pretty.” I talked with Druckman and Jacobs about the book via e-mail. An edited version of […] Read more »
America’s Still-Healing Racial Wounds
Fifty years ago, on March 15, 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson gave one of the most memorable speeches by a U.S. president, calling on Congress to enact a voting rights bill by borrowing the cry of the civil rights movement: “We shall overcome.” The Voting Rights Act passed a little more […] Read more »
For Presidents Day, a look at presidential job approval ratings from Ike to Obama
Perhaps no measure better captures the public’s sentiment toward the president than job approval. It dates back to the earliest days of public opinion polling, when George Gallup asked about Franklin D. Roosevelt starting in the 1930s: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way ____ is handling his job […] Read more »
The Worst President Since World War II?
Is Barack Obama really the worst president since World War II? The Quinnipiac Poll announced just that result result recently. There were thereafter a number of pushbacks from that conclusion, most based on the fact that such an open-end question reflects a “recency bias” in that Americans think about the […] Read more »
Is Obama the Worst Modern President? Take Two
Conservative pundits such as the Wall St. Journal’s Peggy Noonan continue to cite the recent Quinnipiac poll as evidence that Obama is perhaps the worst president to have served during the last seven decades. For reasons I discussed in my previous post, however, I think we need to resist jumping […] Read more »