Dog Days of Summer for Bush Ratings

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Tabular Results
Survey Details
Republican Response
Democratic Response

Public opinion offered no reprieve for President Bush in August as 65% of New Jersey voters continue to say the country is on the wrong track. According to the most recent results of Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMind Poll, only one in four voters (25%) say the country is headed in the right direction, less than one in three (31%) rates the President's job performance as “good” or “excellent,” and only 35% approve overall of the way the President is handling his job.  A majority (57%) disapprove of the President's job performance, and 43% rate his performance as “poor.”

New Jerseyans are very sharply divided by party in their evaluation of both the President and the continuing involvement in Iraq.  While only 11% of Democrats and independents say the country is headed in the right direction, half of Republicans (50%) say the country is headed in the right direction.  While a majority (63%) of Democrats and nearly half (46%) of independents rate the Presidents job performance as “poor,” only 13% of Republicans give him a rating of “poor” and a majority (63%) of Republicans rate him as “good” or “excellent.”

As for Iraq, a majority of Republicans (57%) say the U.S. military effort in Iraq is going “fairly well” or “very well,” but three of four Democrats (73%) disagree as well as three of five (63%) independents.  Likewise, two-thirds of Republicans (67%) say going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do, but four of five Democrats (79%) and three of five (60%) independents say it was a mistake.

“It is unusual for a foreign policy issue to create such a sharp and sustained partisan divide,” said Peter Woolley, director of the poll. “The President wanted to define his term by the war on terror, and later defined the war on terror by intervention in Iraq. But as people view the war in Iraq as distinct from the war on terror, they judge the war and the President more harshly.”

The PublicMind poll of 651 randomly selected registered voters statewide was conducted by telephone from Monday, August 21 through August 27 and has a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

Contacts:

Contacts: Peter Woolley 973.670.3239; Dan Cassino 973.896.7072

Radio actuality line: (201) 692-2846.

For more information, please call (201) 692-7032.