More than half of U.S. voters who describe themselves as independents disapprove of President Barack Obama’s job performance for the first time since he took office in January 2009, according to a poll released Monday.
The Marist Poll found that 57 percent of unaffiliated voters have a negative view of Obama’s job performance, up from 44 percent in a Dec. 8 survey. Twenty-nine percent of independents approve, down from 41 percent, and 14 percent said they were unsure.
“The message of bipartisanship and appealing to independent voters doesn’t seem to be reaching the groups he wants to be reaching,” said Lee M. Miringoff, the director of Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-based Marist College’s Marist Institute of Public ap, in a telephone interview. “This was a group that has been eroding for some time.”
According to exit polls in the 2008 presidential election, 52 percent of voters who identified themselves as independent said they voted for Obama. By comparison, 44 percent said they voted for Republican candidate John McCain, the exit polls conducted for news organizations by Edison Research showed.
Forty-four percent of all voters in the Marist survey approve of Obama’s job performance, down from 46 percent in the Dec. 8 poll, while 47 percent disapprove, up from 44 percent. Eighty-one percent of Democrats said they approve, while 80 percent of Republicans said they disapprove.
The survey also found that 47 percent of voters said Obama has fallen below their expectations as president, up from 42 percent, while 42 percent said he has met their expectations, down from 44 percent. Just 7 percent said Obama has exceeded their expectations, down from 9 percent.
Thirty-eight percent said Obama is changing the country for the worse, up from 35 percent in December, while 37 percent said they think the president is making the U.S. better, down from 44 percent.
The phone poll of 910 registered U.S. voters Feb. 1-3 has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. Bloomberg News
