I’ve done a little research on Presidential job approval ratings for the last twelve Presidents:
Bush
Clinton
Bush the Elder
Reagen
Carter
Ford
Nixon
Johnson
Kennedy
Eisenhower
Truman
F.D. Roosevelt
The data includes highest approval rating for each President and lowest approval rating for each President. Most information for all but the most recent Presidents has come from Gallup. More recent sources include USA Today and television networks.
I’ve also taken the highest and lowest ratings for each one and averaged them.
Using your best educated guesses:
Which President do you think reached the highest job approval rating ever?
Which President reached the lowest job approval rating ever?
Which President had the highest average of the highest and lowest rate of approval?
Which President had the lowest average of highest and lowest rate of approval?
I’ll be back with the answers in two or three days. I will also list the Presidents in order of their approval averages. (Not a true average – just the average of the highest and lowest ratings) There were a couple of surprises for me.
IIRC Bush the Elder got a huge spike after Gulf War I-up around 90%. 18 months later it had
plummeted all the way down to 40% or so. I know in my case leading up to both conventions
in 1992 I was still undecided-until I saw Bush schmoozing with all the Limbaughs and other
assorted right-wing wackos at the RNC, at which point I switched to Clinton.
Another interesting question would be to measure consistency (via standard deviation or the like).
I’d guess Clinton would come out as pretty consistent, with both of the Bushes and
Nixon as very inconsistent.
It may be too soon to rate the two Bushes and Clinton. We are still too emotionally close, and Bush II still has 2 years to go.
Remember that Harry Truman left the presidency with a very low approval rating. He did some very unpopular things. Today it’s accepted that he was right in integrating the military. He was also right when he dismissed Douglas MacArthur.
I remember as a kid that a lot of folks thought Eisenhower was a “do nothing” president. That has changed and his approval rating has gone up.
A little water under the bridge may be needed for better perspective.
I assume the OP is referring to contemporary polls for each president. Emotional closeness would be a factor in all the polls. The only real flaw, if you could call it that, is that since Bush II has two years to go, he has the chance to sink lower (I doubt he’s likely to reach the highs he inexplicably reached post 9/11).
Actually I think I may have been wrong on number 2, I had sworn I’d heard Bush had hit the lowest approval rating since they started recording it, but his 31% low is still higher than Nixon’s lowest that I’ve researched.
I also heard recently that GWB has hit an “historic” low. I knew that Nixon had gone lower and assumed they meant that it was a record low for the current President. Then I saw another poll that had Bush’s numbers even lower than the 31% though still not as low as Nixon’s. According to my source, however, Nixon is not the record holder for these twelve.
Thanks for playing. Maybe I should have mentioned that the winner would get an all expenses paid trip around the world on the Queen Mary II.
Oh well.
Which president do you think reached the highest job approval rating ever?
That would be president George W. Bush shortly after the most successful foreign attack on American soil. Go figure. His job approveal rating was 92%.
Which president reached the lowest job approval rating ever? I thought surely it would be Nixon. No, it was a president now often highly regarded by presidential historians. The one with the buck on his desk: President Harry S. Truman with 22% at his lowest. Can someone give me a clue as to why Harry’s rating went so low?
Which president had the highest average of the highest and lowest rate of approval? His ratings were very high during his thousand days in office. HIs image is tarnished some now, but I’ve never stopped missing him. John F. Kennedy’s high and low average was 68. Coming in second was FDR with 66.
Which president had the lowest average of highest and lowest rate of approval? That would be the one who was forced to resign from office – Richard M. Nixon with an average of 45. I thought he was very bad. I think we’ve had another president who could put him in the shade.
There was a tie for next to last place. Now this is where one of the surprises came in. Can you believe this? James E. Carter and Ronald Reagan tied for next to lowest average! Ford outscored both of them and Truman and Clinton to boot!
Here’s how they ranked by their average of highest and lowest scores:
Kennedy 68
FDR 66
Eisenhower 63.5
GWB 60.5
GHWB 59
Johnson 57.5
Ford 55.5
Truman (tie) 54.5
Clinton (tie) 54.5
Carter (tie) 51.5
Reagen (tie) 51.5
Nixon 45
You may see the high scores and low scores here. Scroll down a little just beyond the aqua graph.
With this post I now concede that somewhere between the Fourth Edition of Harbrace and the Eleventh Edition of Harbrace the tradition of capitalizing the word president whenever it referred to the president of the United States changed. I’ll bet you can guess which edition was in use when I graduated.
Split infinitives, president of the United States, judgement in American English with an “e”…What’s to become of us?
