President Obama’s job approval ratings have taken a dive this week in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll, and the number of voters who give him favorable ratings for leadership has fallen to its lowest level since he took office in January 2009.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 37% of Likely U.S. Voters now say the president is doing a good or excellent job as a leader. Forty percent (40%) rate his performance as poor. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on February 20-21, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.