Bush's Job Approval Average in Last Year One of Worst

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- George W. Bush completes his sixth full year in office Friday, closing the book on a year he might want to forget. For the past year, his job approval averaged 37%, the lowest yearly average of his presidency and one of the lowest Gallup has ever measured. It is one of only seven yearly averages below 40% for any president since Truman. The four quarterly averages for Bush that comprise this yearly average, including the 36% average in the most recent quarter, also rate as the four worst quarters of the Bush presidency.

Bush's support has been consistently below 40% during the past year. Bush has had only a handful of ratings at or above 40% since February 2006, and in each instance his job approval rating fell back below 40% in the subsequent Gallup Poll. All told, he averaged a 37.3% approval rating during his sixth year in office -- spanning the time from Jan. 20, 2006, to Jan. 19, 2007. The ongoing war in Iraq and high gas prices contributed to the low level of public support, which included the lowest individual approval rating of his presidency -- 31% in May 2006. His latest approval rating, from a Jan. 15-18 poll, is 36%.

Bush's best year was his second, when he averaged 71% approval. He has now seen a significant drop in his approval rating in each of the last four years, losing a total of 34 percentage points in support from his second year to his sixth year in office.

Presidents have been either quite popular or quite unpopular in their sixth year in office. Harry Truman and Richard Nixon, like Bush, averaged below 40% approval in their sixth years, while Lyndon Johnson finished his sixth (and final) year in office just above 40%. On the other hand, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton were well above 50% approval in their sixth years.

Bush's most recent yearly approval average also ranks among the worst Gallup has measured for any president in any year since it began regularly tracking presidential approval during the Truman administration. Bush becomes only the fourth president to average less than 40% approval for a year in office -- Truman, Nixon, and Jimmy Carter were the others. The four presidents have recorded a total of seven years below the 40% level. Truman (twice) and Nixon were the only presidents to have yearly averages below 30%. Bush's 37.3% is the fourth lowest Gallup has measured, although it is similar to the 37.4% and 37.6% averages for Carter's final two years.

Latest Quarterly Average

In his most recent quarter in office, from Oct. 20, 2006, to Jan. 19, 2007, Bush averaged 36% approval, which ranks in the bottom 10% of all quarters for which Gallup has data. Bush's last four quarterly averages have all been below 40%, including his low of 35.8% during his 22 ^nd quarter last spring.

Among presidents who served a 24 ^th quarter in office, Truman (26.3%) is the only one who had a lower approval average in that quarter than Bush. Clinton's 66.5% was the best for a 24 ^th quarter, with Eisenhower and Reagan also above 50%. Reagan's popularity began to slide during his 24 ^th quarter because of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Bush's average for his second term so far (from January 2005 to the present) is 41.5%. Only Truman (36.5% in his second term) and Nixon (34.4% in his second term) have had term averages lower than that.

That is a far cry from the strong 62.2% average in Bush's first term, which was bettered by only three presidential terms (Kennedy's 70.1% from 1961 to 1963, Eisenhower's 69.6% from 1953 to 1957, and Johnson's 74.2% from 1963 to 1965).

Despite his second-term struggles, Bush's 55% average approval rating for his entire presidency to date still compares favorably to that of other recent presidents. Clinton and Johnson also averaged 55%, and Reagan averaged 53%. The elder George Bush averaged 61% during his presidency despite his low approval ratings in 1992.

Survey Methods

These results are based on an average of telephone interviews with randomly selected national samples, each of approximately 1,000 adults, aged 18 and older, conducted between Jan. 20, 2006 and Jan. 19, 2007.