I came across a really interesting HuffPo article about presidential approval ratings. I'd noticed that, at least through the presidents I've lived through (not counting Clinton, I was 2), it seems as though approval ratings always steadily decline. So when we learned about how popular FDR was, I wanted to know more about approval ratings and how much they reflect the actual quality of someone's presidency.
Here's the
article I initially referenced. I thought it was really interesting that presidents who many today regard as incredibly effective, on both ends of the political spectrum, such as Reagan and JFK actually went down in popularity while they were in office. Here are the key graphs - on the article itself they're sort of interactive.
Very interesting post Julia! I knew FDR was very popular, but I did not know just how high his approval rating was compared to other presidents. I did some research into the approval rating of solely FDR and found that at its highest, FDR's approval rating reached 85%, which corresponds directly with the United States entering World War 2. The chart can be seen here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/CFIDE/roper/presidential/webroot/presidential_rating_detail.cfm?allRate=True&presidentName=Roosevelt
This is such an interesting post! I think it's very interesting to see how America views our presidents. In my lifetime, I never really have gotten to experience a president who is absolutely adored by all of America, like I had learned about in the past. It is kind of sad to see that the popularity rates of our recent presidents are slowly declining, because it is best when we love our president.
ReplyDeleteWhile looking at these graphs I was very interested in what caused these downward trends. And while in their terms, presidents seem to lose approval. Is it because they do harm, or don't follow through in what they say they will? Also interesting is the fact that they have lesser approval ratings during their second term, in some cases more than a 25 percent difference. I think this is strange because they obviously did well enough in their first term to get elected again, so why do people seem to show such disdain? it is interesting to ponder.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.gallup.com/poll/159809/presidents-typically-less-popular-second-term.aspx
I don't have any source to back this up, but I would guess that the decline in overall popularity over the course of a president's term is due to the unreasonable promises they make while campaigning. They promise the moon, and when they can't deliver (besides perhaps Nixon, the president during Armstrong's moon landing), the people are upset at the broken promises and then their approval of the president goes down.
DeleteTo be fair, I feel like the moon landing would bolster Kennedy's legacy and ratings, rather than Nixon's.
DeleteI think that it is because many people have very high expectations for the president, as they always come through in their campaigns talking about improvement and change, but when they get into office, they are not able to change things as much as people hoped for. Whether this is because they were just empty promises, had difficulty getting Congress to pass their ideas, or found their that ideas were unrealistic, probably varies in each president's case.
DeleteI thought it was interesting that so many presidents have lost popularity from the beginning to the end of their presidency. I thought about everything we have learned about politicians throughout history and came to the conclusion that most politicians present a great plan of what will happen during their upcoming term and what they will do to enhance the country. The candidates need to over-hype what they are going to do in order to win the election. Due to their strong focus on winning the election, some of their promises aren't completely met. Doing something in reality is much harder than saying your going to do something. Sometimes a lack of action isn't the problem, sometimes its just the failure of their plan that causes a decline in popularity as it was in TR's case, for his attempt to restore the broken economy failed and he faced a loss of popularity because of this. A different example can be seen with George W. Bush's presidency where he started an unnecessary war due to 9/11 and trying to catch Osama Bin Laden. I can't say this is the only reason because it isn't, but my point is that presidents lose popularity so easily because of mistakes they make and also due to the majority popularity that they have from the second that they are elected.
ReplyDeleteWoah! It looks like the only presidents to increase in popularity are FDR and Bill Clinton! I understand why Roosevelt would have become increasingly more popular; at the beginning of his presidency he was just someone with big ideas for pulling America out of the Depression. But at the end of his presidency, Americans had seen a significant improvement, and the United States seemed to be on its way up again. In contrast to this, Truman's approval percentage, which was higher than any other president represented in the graph, plummeted. I believe this drop can be sourced to the involvement of the United States in the second World War under his administration.
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