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Obama's Approval Rating Is Correlated in Part With A State's Unemployment Rate

7/5/2009, by Proloy Bhatta

HIGHLIGHTS

• Obama's approval ratings will likely decrease as the unemployment rate begins to rise.
• California, New York, and Washington have net approvals for Obama in the 30s.
• Iowa and New Mexico have had the largest absolute increase in unemployment and have also had the highest net disapproval for Obama in the past month.

As per my article yesterday, adults remain hopeful of Obama's policies despite seeing very little improvement to issues such as the war, economy, and congress.

So I thought it would be fun to take a look at the unemployment rate of states and correlate it with Obama's approval rating.

Here is a table of Obama's latest approval ratings according to SurveyUSA.

Here are the current unemployment rates in those very same states according to the Department of Labor.

Flaws

1. we do not have approval ratings for all 50 states
2. it would be silly to blindly compare a state's unemployment rate with Obama's approval rating since some states are highly partisan

If we define red states as those that voted for McCain in 2008, we only have data points for Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, and Missouri.

The two states with the highest unemployment rate have an average net approval rating of -3.5 while the two states with the lowest unemployment rate has an average net approval rating of +3. We do not have a large sample size here so we won't do any further data mining on this.

But at least it temporarily shows higher unemployment rates are correlated with lower approvals for Obama.

Now let's look at Blue States.

Since highly partisan states like California and New York would have a high net approval rating of Obama regardless of what their unemployment rate was, I did a quick cursory comparison between the net approval rating with Obama's margin of victory in 2008.

But that does not produce clear results at all either. New Mexico, for example, has the second lowest unemployment rate of the mix but Obama's net approval rating drops the most of any state when comparing it with his margin of victory in 2008.

It is when we compare the change in unemployment rate for the last month with the change in Obama's approval ratings, do we come to a better conclusion.

The states that had the largest absolute increase in unemployment were also the states to have the largest shifts towards disapproval for Obama. Unemployment rate is obviously not the only thing voters consider when giving their approval/disapproval towards a presidential candidate but it does play a role.

Oregon, New York, and California did not have major shifts towards disapproval for Obama but is likely due to the fact that they are solid blue states. Iowa and New Mexico were battleground states for Bush-Kerry 2004 so they are more prone to change vis-a-vis their independent streak.

Obama's approval rating still remains high but as the unemployment figure slowly increases so will Obama's disapproval rate. This is an obvious conclusion that could have been made without doing any research but what the research suggests is that it will be in battleground states* where Obama's popularity will drop the most. For democrats to ensure an Obama reelection in 2012, he would need to keep states like Iowa and New Mexico happy.

Here is a figure showing how the unemployment rate has only recently gone beyond normal levels.

* Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were not included here because we do not have tracking data of Obama's approval in the state.