48% Rate Obama Poorly on Economy

Positive views of President Obama's economic leadership have fallen to their lowest level in 18 months.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 32% of Likely U.S. Voters now give the president good or excellent marks for his handling of economic issues. These are his lowest positives since June of last year. Nearly half (48%) rate him poorly in this area, the highest level of criticism since August 2012. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The Political Class, however, strongly disagrees. Sixty-one percent (61%) of Political Class voters think the president is doing a good or excellent job with the economy, while 57% of Mainstream voters rate his performance as poor.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of Democrats like the job the president is doing with the economy. Seventy-nine percent (79%) of Republicans and 52% of voters not affiliated with either major party do not. 

Obama fares slightly better when it comes to national security. Thirty-nine percent (39%) of all voters rate his handling of national security issues as good or excellent,  while 40% say he's doing a poor job. This is consistent with surveying for the past several months.

Obama's daily job approval ratings are running at the lowest levels of his presidency, due in large part to the problems surrounding the new national health care law.

Fifty percent (50%) of voters believe Congress and the president should repeal the new national health care law and start over again. Another 31% think Congress and the president should go through the law piece by piece to improve it. 

But the Rasmussen Employment Index which measures worker confidence jumped five points in November. October’s finding was the lowest level of confidence measured this year. Generally an increase in the index signals that the next government jobs report will be better than expected.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on December 2-3, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.  

Twenty percent (20%) of adult consumers believe the U.S. economy is in good or excellent condition; 42% disagree.

Older voters rate the president more negatively on both the economy and national security than younger voters do. 

Blacks overwhelmingly and pluralities of other minority voters think the president is doing a good or excellent job in both areas. Most whites think he's doing poorly. 

Thirty-five percent (35%) of Homeowners now believe the value of their home will go up over the next year, well above confidence measured from 2009 through 2012.

However, most Americans expect to be paying higher rates a year from now.

Voters are almost evenly divided over a treaty the United States has reached with Iran to slow that country’s nuclear weapons program and tend to think the arrangement is likely to make things worse in the Middle East.

The Obama administration is negotiating a security deal with Afghanistan that would leave some U.S. troops there for the foreseeable future, but 51% of voters want all Americans troops out of Afghanistan by next year.

Voters continue to trust Republicans more than Democrats on both the economy and national security issues.

Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

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