If you follow politics for long enough, you may notice that coverage of presidential approval suffers from a bizarre ahistoricism. Reporters typically have almost no understanding of the forces that drive presidential approval or the patterns it tends to follow during the course of a president's time in office.
That's why it's amusing to see so many people acting like it's news that approval of President Obama's handling of health care and overall job performance numbers are trending downward (particularly among independents and Republicans). Of course his numbers are going down! It's been a virtual certainty that this transition would take place since the day Obama took office. The only question was when it would happen and how far down they would go.
The reason is simple. Presidential approval tends to decline after the honeymoon period as the opposition party begins to be more critical of the president. These messages remind opposition party members and sympathetic independents why they dislike the president. As a result, his approval numbers go down. This decline was likely to be especially significant in Obama's case because his initial Gallup approval levels were the highest for any president since JFK.*
The same reasoning applies to approval of Obama's handling of health care, which has also declined. At first, Obama benefitted from what the political scientist John Zaller calls a one-message environment in which Congressional Republicans offered platitudes about their desire to work with him on health care. However, as the legislative process has moved forward, the GOP and its allies in the press have begun to aggressively attack his approach to the issue. As such, Republicans and sympathetic independents in the electorate are now more likely to tell pollsters that they don't approve of Obama's handling of the issue.
The upside for Obama is that these numbers don't seem to indicate anything specific about the prospects for his health care plan. It would be surprising if the public didn't start to split along partisan lines at this point given the nature of the proposal. There isn't much information here that the two parties couldn't have anticipated (though it would be helpful to put the numbers in context -- how do Obama's health care approval numbers compare to, say, Clinton's in July 1993?)
When was the last time a President's campaign style attempt to sell a policy has actually succeeded in selling the policy? I can't remember it. I can remember lots of flops (e.g.,Bush on Social Security). Traditional trips to non-Beltway places like Cleveland get heavily filtered by the media, for example. Prime time news conferences don't get huge ratings, right?
In general, political scientists have found that presidential efforts to change public opinion on domestic policy initiatives are rarely successful. The combination of the media filter and the offsetting effects of opposition messages tends to neutralize White House sales campaigns.
In a highly polarized era, opinion on the president and his policy proposals is likely to be, well, highly polarized. Again, there's not a lot of news here. The media should instead be focusing on the Senate, which is where the fate of health care legislation will be decided.
* In an article for National Journal, Mark Blumenthal attributes the timing of the decline to the state of the economy. He may be right -- there's no doubt that economic perceptions influence approval. But it's hard to isolate one factor as the cause of Obama's decline in approval with such a limited amount of data.
Update 7/21 12:34 PM: The other reason it shouldn't be surprising that Obama's numbers are declining is that the aggregate preference of the electorate for more or less government -- what the political scientist James Stimson calls public mood -- tends to move in the opposite direction of a dominant governing party. His current plot of mood data for 1952-2008 illustrates the point:
As such, we should expect the public to move in a conservative direction over the next few years.
Update 7/21 2:14 PM: More ahistoricism from Drudge, who is claiming it's a "danger sign" that Obama's approval levels are less than Carter's were at this point in his presidency:
In fact, however, Carter was quite popular in the first year of his presidency -- more popular, in fact, than George W. Bush pre-9/11. I'm pretty sure Drudge didn't see that as a "danger sign" for Bush at the time.
(PS From a graphical perspective, note also how Drudge's extremely narrow graphic exaggerates the negative slope of Obama's approval trajectory.)
Update 7/21 3:48 PM: For more on Obama's declining health care approval numbers, see this new post from Gallup, which finds that more people disapprove of Obama (50%) on the issue than approve (44%). By contrast, the Post poll linked above finds 49% approve of how Obama has handled health care and 44% disapprove.