A while back, the Pew Research Center compared President Obama’s first-term approval ratings to those of his predecessors, stretching back to Richard Nixon. The point of Pew’s report was to show the tremendous partisan gap in Obama’s approval ratings – 88 percent of Democrats approved of Obama’s performance versus a measly 27 percent of Republicans. Overall, Obama’s job approval rating stood at a healthy 59 percent (slightly down from its current 61 percent). What’s far more interesting though, is the fact that Americans have such an overwhelmingly positive impression of Obama’s presidency. So much so, that as Slate’s Christopher Beam notes, Americans who didn’t support Obama in November are now claiming to have voted for him:
When respondents were asked by the WSJ whom they voted for in the 2008 presidential elections, 41 percent said they voted for Obama, compared with 32 percent for McCain. Factor out the 18 percent who said they didn’t vote, and you’ve got Obama beating McCain by 11 points, 50 percent to 39 percent.
//The gap in the New York Times poll is even wider. In it, 48 percent of respondents said they voted for Obama, compared with 25 percent for McCain. Again, subtract the 19 percent who say they didn’t vote, and you’ve got Obama winning by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, with 60 percent to McCain’s 32 percent.
This is actually a lot more common than you would think. Absent some easily attributable miserable failure, first-term presidents tend to have fairly high job approval ratings (from Pew’s data):
Considering the enthusiasm most Americans have for newly elected presidents, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to see some voters claim that they supported the president during the election. After all, he’s popular and most people want to claim some kind of connection to a popular president. Of course, this goes both ways – if the results of this 2006 New York Times poll are any indication, John Kerry beat George Bush with a reasonably comfortable margin.
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