The Numbers Don’t Lie: Intense repugican Hate Is Skewing Obama Polls

A Pew examination of presidential poll numbers revealed that intense repugican hatred of President Obama weighs down his job approval numbers.

According to Pew Research:

Views of the president among members of the opposing party have become steadily more negative over time. Our 2014 report on political polarization documented this dramatic growth in partisan divisions over views of presidential job performance. Over the course of Obama’s presidency, his average approval rating among Democrats has been 81%, compared with just 14% among repugicans.

During Eisenhower’s two terms, from 1953-1960, an average of 49% of Democrats said they approved of the job the repugican pretender was doing in office. During ronny raygun’s junta, an average of 31% of Democrats approved of his job performance. And just over a quarter (27%) of repugicans offered a positive assessment of Clinton between 1993 and 2000. But the most recent pretender, the shrub  –  and President Obama – have not received even this minimal level of support.

These numbers confirm a suspicion that repugican Obama hate is throwing off the polls. President Obama isn’t as unpopular with the country at large as he is with repugicans. Obama’s job approval ratings are being weighed down by the fact that he gets nearly half the support from self-identified repugicans that Bill Clinton did. The idea that repugicans impeached Clinton and tried to throw him out of office, but still got more of their support than President Obama is a real mind blower.

Even if one tries to account for the increased level of polarization in politics by assigning the president 20% approval rating from repugicans, the difference in Obama’s approval rating would be dramatic. The president would go from a 48%-50% approval rating to something more in the neighborhood of 54%-56%.

The repugican hatred of Obama is so intense that it is difficult for pollsters to get an accurate reading on the president’s true level of popularity. The extreme intensity of the opposition prohibits a good read on where the president stands in the court of public opinion, but it does illustrate the degree to which our national politics has become polarized.

Irrational repugican hatred of Obama is making it impossible to accurately compare polls. This doesn’t mean that the polls are wrong, but that the Obama polling is more accurately measuring polarization than the president’s job performance.