Why Obama’s Approval Rating Isn’t Higher

• By Charlie Cook
• June 17, 2013
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The good news for President Obama and his administration is that all the controversies swirling around the White House have not had a significant impact on his job-approval ratings. The bad news is that, like so many other second-term administrations, Obama’s may end up spending so much of its last four years fighting fires and fending off congressional inquiries that it gets little else done. Even if Obama manages to douse some of the current controversies, new ones, even minor ones, could constantly distract him and throw him off message to the point that he can’t make headway on any of his major proposals.

History has not been kind to second-term presidents. By that point, the novelty has worn off, and the energy, the new ideas, and the sense of purpose are lost. Often wars, recessions, or scandals plague the final four years; second-term presidents become like pitchers who have lost their fastball.

Obama’s job-approval ratings in the Gallup Poll have averaged between 47 percent and 51 percent each week since mid-February. This past week, June 3-9, his approval rating was 48 percent and his disapproval rating was 45 percent. All of the other major polls except ...

Gallup’s Open Book

• By Charlie Cook
• June 11, 2013
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It isn’t unusual for individuals, organizations, or even political parties to make mistakes, but it is unusual, certainly in Washington, to see anyone own up to them. What is truly extraordinary is for any person or group to conduct, release, and publicize an exhaustive research project detailing what went wrong and why. In the past three months, we have now seen two groups do just that.

First, the Republican National Committee, chaired by Reince Priebus, issued its “Growth and Opportunity Project,” essentially an autopsy of what went wrong for the GOP in the last election. The report looked at mistakes the party made and what it needed to do for Republicans to get back on track. Now the Gallup Organization has released an executive summary of its own postmortem, which explains how its polling of likely voters ended up projecting a Mitt Romney win by 1 percentage point, 49 percent to 48 percent, in an election the Republican nominee ended up losing by almost 4 points (3.85 to be exact). Interestingly, Gallup’s final polling among all registered voters, as opposed to the smaller subset of voters judged to be the most likely to go to the polls ...

No Wonder Republican Criticism of Obama Isn’t Working

• By Charlie Cook
• May 28, 2013
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Henny Youngman, the late borscht belt comedian, told hundreds of politically incorrect jokes. One of them was his response when asked, “How’s your wife?” “Compared to what?” he’d say.

Many women find the joke tasteless, but it can be a useful framework for thinking about national politics. Americans may not be ecstatic about President Obama and his policies, but compared with the Republicans, they think Obama doesn’t look so bad. This might partly explain why, even with all of the controversies engulfing the Obama administration these days, the president doesn’t appear to be hurt at all, at least as measured by job-approval ratings.

The numbers paint a picture very different from most congressional Republicans’ view of the world. Obama’s job-approval ratings are pretty much where they have been for the past few months, before the controversies over Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Associated Press began dominating the news two weeks ago. The May 17-18 CNN/ORC poll pegs Obama’s job approval at 53 percent, up 2 points from early April. The Gallup Organization’s polling for the week of May 6-12 showed that 49 percent approve and 44 percent disapprove of the ...

Republicans Should Go Easy on Obama, At Least in Public

• By Charlie Cook
• May 20, 2013
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With the newest controversy over Justice Department subpoenas of Associated Press reporters’ and editors’ telephone records, President Obama and his administration find themselves drawing fire from three different directions. Last week’s stories indicating that the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea-party groups and other conservative organizations for investigation sent a shiver down the spines of those of us who lived in Washington 40 years ago during the Watergate scandal. Meanwhile, allegations about the lapses in security that led to the fatal attacks on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year—as well as about the administration’s candor in the days after the attack—are getting new scrutiny. In the wake of these three developing stories, journalists typically quite sympathetic to the administration are raising questions about its performance. In fact, even reliably sycophantic reporters and commentators have joined the attack, and that’s a bad sign for any president.

Unfortunately, the overly broad subpoenas in the AP case distract from what could have been a legitimate and constructive debate over whether overly zealous journalists and news organizations hotly in pursuit of a “good story” can jeopardize vital intelligence activities aimed at preventing terrorist acts and uncovering terrorist ...

Virginia Means More Than South Carolina

• By Charlie Cook
• May 13, 2013
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Republican Mark Sanford’s victory Tuesday in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District tells us only one thing about the 2014 midterm elections—that Democrats still need to capture 17 seats to win back the House majority they lost in 2010. Nothing more, nothing less.

Had Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch won the special election, all it would have demonstrated was that even in such an overwhelmingly Republican district (Mitt Romney carried it by 18 points last year, John McCain by 13 points in 2008), a scandal-ridden, politically disfigured Republican could still lose. Because Sanford ended up winning, all it showed was that district voters prefer to hold their noses and vote for a deeply flawed Republican than to vote for a Democrat. It should be noted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi figured prominently in Sanford’s last round of advertising; the former governor warned that a vote for Colbert Busch was a vote to make Pelosi House speaker again.

There have been times when a special congressional election told us something about the national political environment, but those instances are few and far between. More often, the districts bear little resemblance to the country as a whole, or the ...