A new national poll of adults from Bloomberg contains bad news galore for the White House. A few key details:
(1) President Obama's job approval sits at just 39 percent, his personal low mark in the polling series. He's been equally weak in other recent surveys.
(2) The GOP's approval rating is at a five-year high (45/47), although the party's image is still slightly more negative than positive. Democrats are in worse shape, with a bare majority disapproving (41/50).
(3) Obama struggles on every issue polled, performing best on the economy, on which his approval is still 11 points underwater. Ed Morrissey runs through the rest of the poor marks: "[Obama's] foreign policy approval is 37/51, and health care only gets 41/55. Obama gets a 37/54 on immigration a couple of weeks after his big “I’m gonna act alone” statement.
(4) And how are Americans reacting to that executive fiat, which bypasses Congress to rewrite immigration laws? Not well:
As for Obama’s decision to take executive action to give some illegal immigrants temporary legal status, 56 percent say they don’t approve, while 39 percent are okay with it and 5 percent aren’t sure. This is partly a partisan issue; 83 percent of Republicans oppose the decisions while two-thirds of Democrats favor them. More ominously, though, a clear majority—57 percent—of independents oppose the actions.
Substantial, majority opposition, with public support for the unprecedented power grab upside-down by 17 points. Independents side with Republicans on the issue. As Republicans gear up to fight Obama on this issue in the next Congress, they appear to be persuading the public that Obama has overstepped his authority. As a reminder, Obama agreed with that assessment until very recently:
(5) I'll leave you with Bloomberg quoting a blue collar Pennsylvania Democrat who may not be in love with Republicans, but who's seen enough of Obama:
Roman Kenenitz, 62, a Democrat from Mount Carmel, Pa., says that "mainly the disgust with Obama" is what's driving his more favorable views of the Republican Party rather than any sense that they are getting things done. His shift in partisan preference was intensified after the president last month announced a reprieve for the undocumented parents of children born in the U.S. and an expansion of permits for high-skilled foreign workers. Kenenitz said that Obama is “too much of a flip-flop type guy" and that "with him pulling this executive power” the president is “like a crybaby—‘it’s my way or no way’—and I just don’t feel he’s doing a good job.” “Right now I feel they’re trying to put the brakes on him,” Kenenitz said of Republicans.
Which is precisely what Americans elected them to do.