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Obama's Dwindling Support Due to Independents

11/24/2009, by Proloy Bhatta

HIGHLIGHTS

• Obama has dropped 7% and 15% among Independents respectively since they each last conducted their polls.
• When Obama's approval rating dropped below 60% in July, it was due to loss of Republican support.
• Obama has yet to lose significant amount of Democrat support.

Marist College conducted a recent poll of registered voters in New York.

Marist asks these voters to rate how Obama was doing in office and they were given these as possible responses: Execellent, Good, Fair, and Poor.

Marist last conducted this poll in September and since then, Obama's "excellent" rating has dropped 7% but his "good" rating climbed 10% and his "poor" rating dropped 6%. Even though there are fewer voters willing to give him an excellent grade, it does not necessarily come at the expense of higher "poor" ratings.

When FOX News polled Obama's approval rating nationally to be 46%, I thought surely it was because of defecting Democrats. But when I looked at their article, they reported Obama's support to be 85% among Democrats.

Here are the latest Obama approval polls among Democrats.

When we compare these polls to how Obama began his presidency - we would see that they are almost equivalent. Disapproval with Obama has increased but that was to be expected from 2%!

Obama's approval rating among Democrats did get up to the low 90-s from March to June but has steadily been in the mid-to-high 80s his whole presidency.

So if Obama has not been losing the support of Democrats, whose support has he been losing? Only Republicans?

According to our aggregation of Obama's approval ratings among Republicans, we can see that Obama dropped to the teens and low-20s sometime in late July.

If we look at the results from FOX News, we can see that these poll numbers dropped significantly in July and has remained steady since.

CBS measured the same drop in late July.

Looking at Gallup's daily tracking poll, Obama's approval rating has been below 60% ever since July 18. Shrinking Republican support was the reason for this.

But Obama's dwindling support among Independents is what is fueling his current slide below 50%. According to CBS and Fox, Obama has dropped 7% and 15% among Independents respectively since they each last conducted their polls.

In summary, Obama's current slide is due to the dwindling of support among Independents.

among Republicans, no change since last month.

among Democrats no change his entire presidency.

Has Obama lost the middle or is he going through a rough patch?