Rhodes Cook, a political analyst, is publisher of the bimonthly political newsletter “The Rhodes Cook Letter.”

Barack Obama has had an unusual presidency, winning election twice with a majority of the vote, yet frequently saddled with a job approval rating below 50 percent. In fact, only during his “honeymoon” period in 2009 and around his reelection in 2012 has a majority of the population approved of his performance for more than mere days at a time.

So, midway through his sixth year in office and with fewer and fewer opportunities to realize his goals for the presidency, does Obama stand a chance of getting his numbers back above 50 percent? An upswing would surely help struggling Democratic congressional candidates in elections this fall, not to mention that it could give a boost to Obama’s policy initiatives in Congress and might even add a bit of gloss to his presidential legacy. And he has signaled he intends to “go down to the wire fighting,” as political adviser David Plouffe recently told Politico.


History, though, says don’t bet on a revival. The norm since World War II is for presidents to score their highest job approval ratings in their first term, then slump dramatically in their second. From Harry Truman immediately after World War II to George W. Bush in the opening years of the 21st century, this has been the trend in the Gallup poll, the long-running chronicler of presidential job approval ratings: In numerical terms, the 11 presidents from Truman to Bush II entered office with an average job approval rating of 65 percent and left with an average of 48 percent.

If Obama wants a model of how to finish strong, it’s Bill Clinton. After a choppy first term that saw Democrats lose control of both houses of Congress in 1994, Clinton rebounded strongly to post approval scores well above 50 percent throughout much of his second term. A prosperous economy helped. So, it appeared, did Republican overreach in pushing for his impeachment as an outgrowth of the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Who knows—the economy could take off again, boosting Obama along with it. The Republicans could overreach on some matter of major import. Or a sudden “rally around the president” event, such as (God forbid) a major terrorist attack, could propel the president’s approval rating dramatically upward.

This would be an exception to the way a presidency usually plays out. But would it be in the realm of possibility? Quite definitely.

(Graph shows monthly averages of Gallup approval ratings.)

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Harry S. Truman (1945-53)

Although history rates him as one of the nation’s greater presidents, Truman was not widely known when he assumed the presidency upon the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945, and he never fully escaped the impression of being “the little man in the White House.” He enjoyed a “honeymoon” period through 1945, which encompassed the end of World War II. But his approval scores began to plummet shortly thereafter, as the nation struggled to switch from a war-time to a peacetime footing and to respond to Soviet advances in Europe. Truman enjoyed an upswing or two in the polls, most notably after his fabled come-from-behind victory in the 1948 presidential election. But he slumped again as a frustrating war in Korea, begun in 1950, dragged on. In late 1951 and early 1952, his presidential approval score bottomed out at 23 percent, the lowest ever recorded by Gallup.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)

Ike enjoyed high approval ratings for much of his presidency, often above 70 percent, due in large part to the respect that he had earned as leader of Allied forces in Europe during World War II—which, combined with a winning smile and an avuncular manner, conveyed a sense of steadiness. It was a quality badly needed at the time. With the Cold War at its height, there was an ongoing fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and efforts to end desegregation in the South began to roil domestic politics significantly. Eisenhower’s approval rating slumped a bit in his second term as the nation experienced an economic downturn. But he left the White House in 1961 with his job approval in the vicinity of 60 percent, as the economy improved a tad toward the end of his presidency.

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John F. Kennedy (1961-63)

If Eisenhower represented the past, Kennedy represented the future. The combination of his youth, along with his vigor, wit and inspirational rhetoric, made him a popular figure throughout much of his brief presidency. Kennedy’s approval rating stayed above 70 percent for almost his first year-and-a-half in office, even with a foreign policy debacle at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in the opening months of his administration. Kennedy’s approval numbers declined a bit in the summer of 1962, only to rebound with his deft handling of the Cuban missile crisis that October. Across the course of 1963, however, approval for Kennedy began to decline again without a corrective. By the time of his assassination that November in Dallas, his job approval had fallen below 60 percent for the first time.

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Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)

A stunned nation gave Johnson an approval rating in the vicinity of 80 percent when he assumed office in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. And his scores stayed high for the next two years as Johnson melded the continuation of his predecessor’s agenda with his own “Great Society.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the “war on poverty” were all part of the legislative onslaught, given added momentum by Johnson’s landslide election victory in 1964. But with the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the onset of urban rioting, the “great” society gave way to the sense of one that was beginning to unravel. By the beginning of 1966, Johnson’s approval rating had fallen below 60 percent for the first time; by the fall of that year, it was consistently below 50 percent; and by the summer of 1967 it had fallen for a time below 40 percent. Johnson never regained anywhere near his initial popularity, and in March 1968 he announced he would not seek another term as president.

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Richard M. Nixon (1969-74)

A veteran politician, Nixon won the White House in a three-way contest with just 43 percent of the vote. So there was little excitement when he took office, and he did not experience the buoyant honeymoon period some other presidents have. Nixon still drew solid marks during his first term. His administration earned points for focusing on “law and order,” taking moderate positions on issues such as the environment and launching bold foreign policy initiatives, such as the opening of relations with China. Nixon’s abbreviated second term, though, was of course defined by the “Watergate” scandal. Over the course of 1973, his approval rating dropped from nearly 70 percent to less than 30 percent. And by the time he resigned in August 1974, with the threat of impeachment pending, it was less than 25 percent.

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Gerald R. Ford (1974-77)

Like the man himself, Ford’s approval ratings were steady but not spectacular. His honeymoon, if you can call it that, lasted a matter of weeks—from early August 1974, when he assumed the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation, until September, when he issued his predecessor a pardon. The move was controversial, and from then onward Ford’s approval rating seldom reached 50 percent. But it did not collapse to the depths that Truman and Nixon had known. Whatever one thought of his politics, Ford was widely regarded as an honest and decent man. He nearly won a full term of his own in 1976, even with the mountain of baggage that Watergate had left for the Republican Party.

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Jimmy Carter (1977-81)

Carter was largely elected to the White House in 1976 as an antidote to Nixon. A faith-based former peanut farmer from rural Georgia, he was essentially the opposite of a career politician. Yet while he bonded with voters in 1976, he never won over Democratic leaders in Washington, or for that matter, much of the party’s liberal base. Once he began sliding in the polls after his honeymoon period, he managed only temporary recoveries. One uptick came with the successful conclusion of the Camp David talks in September 1978. A second surge began in late 1979, when the start of the Iranian hostage crisis generated “rally around the flag” sentiment. The timing of the crisis boosted Carter in the critical early stages of the Democratic nominating process, helping him to rebuff a serious challenge from Sen. Edward Kennedy. But Carter’s approval rating ebbed downward again after that, as words such as “malaise” and “misery index” came to define his presidency.

Ronald Reagan (1981-89)

Reagan has taken on iconic stature, especially among Republicans. But in reality he never reached the heights of presidential approval that many other occupants of the White House have. When he faced an assassination attempt in March 1981, his approval ratings went up for a time, but the economic downturn that bedeviled Carter began to take its toll on Reagan as well. Only when the economy began to brighten, and Reagan could successfully run for reelection in 1984 on the theme of “Morning in America,” did his approval scores begin to rise. They did not stay up indefinitely, however. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke in late 1986, Reagan’s approval ratings took a tumble.

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George H.W. Bush (1989-93)

As a foreign policy president, Bush was quite a success. He reaped the benefits of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his approval ratings skyrocketed with the successful execution of the first Gulf War against Iraq, in early 1991. By that March, Bush’s rating was approaching 90 percent. But the war ended quickly, and national attention turned to an increasingly sluggish economy and, among conservatives in particular, to Bush’s abandonment of the “no new taxes” pledge he had trumpeted in the 1988 campaign. His approval numbers fell dramatically by 1992, to the point that during the summer they briefly fell below 30 percent. That fall, Bush decisively lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton.

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Bill Clinton (1993-2001)

As noted above, unlike most modern presidents, Clinton posted higher approval ratings in his second term than his first. The latter started poorly. Like Nixon in 1968, Clinton was elected in 1992 with 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race. There was no honeymoon to speak of. And a series of controversial presidential measures, led by a failed health care initiative, kept Clinton’s approval numbers frequently below 50 percent during his first two years in office. In 1994, his Democratic allies paid a steep price, as the party lost control of both houses of Congress—the Senate for the first time in eight years, the House for the first time in 40. Clinton managed to mount a personal comeback that resulted in his easy reelection in 1996. And during much of his second term, he was boosted by a widespread sense of prosperity. The economic backdrop helped Clinton to post some of his highest approval scores in 1998 and early 1999, when Republicans were pursuing his impeachment.

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George W. Bush (2001-09)

Like his father, George W. Bush experienced the extreme highs and lows of presidential approval. Yet unlike his father, he was able to win a second term. That was due in large part to the pair of “rally around the flag” events that marked Bush’s initial term: first, the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and second, the outset of the Iraq War in 2003. The horror of 9/11 provided the biggest surge in Bush’s approval rating—from barely 50 percent approval in early September to 90 percent just two weeks later. A smaller uptick came with the launch of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. After that, approval for Bush’s job performance generally went into a long, steady decline, exacerbated in his second term by a major economic downturn.

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Barack Obama (2009- )

There has been frequent comment in recent years that Obama is more popular as a campaigner than as a president. It may bear some truth. He has been elected twice to the White House, with 53 and 51 percent, respectively. But his presidential approval rating has often been below 50 percent, since the end of his brief honeymoon in 2009. Obama has been saddled throughout his presidency with a sluggish economy, which featured an unusually high unemployment rate of at least 9 percent for more than two years, from April 2009 to September 2011. His approval rating has also been affected by the current polarization in American politics, with Republican voters nowadays voicing little support for Democratic presidents and vice versa. Obama’s approval score rose above 50 percent for a time around the 2012 election, after his campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote his reelection. It was not long afterward, though, that his approval mark drifted back below 50 percent, burdened by a series of woes that included the lingering unpopularity and botched rollout of his signature achievement, Obamacare.