Obama approval rating slides: Scandals taking toll?
Is political controversy dragging down President Obama鈥檚 approval rating? That鈥檚 what the results of a new Quinnipiac University poll appear to indicate.
finds Mr. Obama鈥檚 job performance numbers underwater, with 45 percent approving of his presidential actions and 49 percent disapproving. That represents a reversal from a May 1 Quinnipiac survey, when 48 percent of respondents approved of Obama鈥檚 performance and 45 percent disapproved.
Obama鈥檚 standing with self-identified Republicans and Democrats stayed pretty much the same. The difference in the latest poll was independents, who gave the president a negative 37 percent to 57 percent rating, compared with a negative 42 percent to 48 percent rating on May 1.
This slide occurs at a time when the White House has been dogged by criticism about its actions in the wake of last September鈥檚 fatal attacks on a US building in Benghazi, Libya, the apparent targeting of conservative nonprofit groups by the IRS, and the Justice Department鈥檚 surreptitious investigation of journalists鈥� communications.
In the Quinnipiac survey, a plurality of voters dismissed the Libya investigation as 鈥渏ust politics.鈥� They appeared to take the IRS matter much more seriously, however. By a margin of 76 percent to 17 percent, respondents said a special prosecutor should investigate the IRS charges.
鈥淭here is overwhelming bipartisan support for a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS,鈥� said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, in a press release.
It鈥檚 important to note, however, that this is just one poll. The still has Obama鈥檚 rating above water (barely), with 48.7 percent approving of his actions and 48 percent approving.
Some other individual surveys that asked questions over the same days as Quinnipiac found much different results. rolling job approval rating, which includes responses collected up until May 28, has a 50 percent positive score for the president, with 43 percent disapproving of his job performance.
That鈥檚 not any different from the beginning of the month. On May 1, Gallup reported an identical 50 percent to 43 percent Obama job-performance split.
The bottom line is that it still may be too early to tell if current political controversies will be a continued drag on Obama鈥檚 polls. Overall, the RealClearPolitics average has bounced around over the past month, showing no clear trend of either down or up.
