The National Journal points out that Obama has lost support in two key areas, the approval rating and the right-track/wrong-track assessment and his position today more resembles the profile of incumbents who were defeated than those who won reelection.Like an early-autumn frost, a blast of pessimism about the country’s direction has snapped a slow but steady warming trend toward President Obama in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey.
Just 44 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Obama’s performance as president—his lowest rating in the 10 Heartland Monitor polls conducted since April 2009. Likewise, the share of adults disapproving of his performance also reached a high at 50 percent. Those results reversed modest but consistent gains for Obama since his previous low point in the survey in August 2010. In the most recent survey, conducted last May in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden raid, Obama’s approval rating had edged up to 51 percent, with only 41 percent disapproving.
Equally ominous for the president: 70 percent of those polled in the new survey said that the country was on the wrong track. That’s a sharp increase just since the most recent Heartland Monitor in May—and by far the highest level of dissatisfaction over the country’s direction recorded in any of the 10 polls. (The previous high was 62 percent in August 2010, just before the GOP landslide in the midterm elections that year.) Only one-fifth believed the country was moving in the right direction.
These numbers are consistent with the Real Clear Politics average for Obama's approval/disapproval which consists of multiple polling done by a variety of other organizations.
The Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey, in fact, shows a lower number of Americans finding the country heading in the wrong direction than the RCP average shows, with the survey referenced above saying 70 percent, but the averaging from other polling sources show 76.5 percent of the country believing it is heading in the wrong direction and only 17 percent, on average, saying we are heading the right way.
Either way it is an overwhelming majority believing the country is on the wrong track.
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