FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACTS:
March 6, 2013 Ken
Blake, Ph.D., MTSU Poll Director (615) 210-6187
Jason
Reineke, Ph.D., MTSU Poll Associate Director (615) 494-7746
Overwhelming disapproval for Congress, but Senators
Alexander and Corker doing good job
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Majority disapproval for the job that Barack Obama
is doing as president is holding steady in Tennessee despite his re-election in
November 2012, according to the latest MTSU Poll.
A
51 percent majority disapprove of the job Obama is doing while only 33 percent
approve. These figures are statistically the same as the results the last time
that the poll asked Tennesseans statewide about job approval for Obama in the
spring of 2012.
“It
is common for newly-elected presidents to receive a significant positive bump
in the polls after their first election to office — even among those who did
not support them, as was the case for Obama in Tennessee in 2008,” said Dr.
Jason Reineke, associate director of the poll at Middle Tennessee State
University. “It is less common for re-elected presidents to receive a similar
benefit of the doubt from those who were opposed to their re-election, and in this
case the election seems to have made no difference at all in how Tennesseans
evaluate the current president.”
Predictably,
political party affiliation was the best predictor of Obama’s presidential job
approval, with 77 percent of Tennessee’s self-identified Democrats saying that
they approve while 84 percent of Republicans disapprove. A majority of those
who say that they are politically independent — 55 percent — disapprove of the
job Obama is doing as president.
If
political party affiliation — which is determined in large part by evaluations
of the president — is set aside, the most important difference in presidential
approval in Tennessee is attributable to race. Among whites, 59 percent
disapprove while only 26 percent approve, and the rest say they don’t know or
refuse to answer the question. Among African-Americans in Tennessee, 87 percent
say they approve of the job Obama is doing as president while only 3 percent
say that they disapprove.
Congress even worse
However,
the U.S. Congress receives an even worse evaluation from Tennesseans. Fully 70
percent of Tennesseans say that they disapprove of the way that the U.S. Congress
is handling its job while only 14 percent approve.
“Tennesseans
express an overwhelming disapproval for the U.S. Congress, by a margin of
5-to-1 over those who say that they approve,” said Reineke. “Furthermore, this
disapproval exists across the board — among men and women, blacks and whites,
Democrats, Republicans, and Independents — far more disapprove of how Congress
is handling its duties than approve.”
Tennessee’s
own U.S. senators, however, fare much better than Congress as a whole. A
majority of Tennesseans, 54 percent, approve of how the state’s senior U.S.
senator, Lamar Alexander, is handling his job while only 20 percent disapprove.
Similarly, 57 percent approve of the job that the state’s recently re-elected
junior senator, Bob Corker, is doing, while only 18 percent disapprove. The
rest don’t know or refuse to answer the questions.
Even
pluralities of self-identified Democrats, 48 percent for both Alexander and Corker,
approve of the job that the state’s U.S. senators are doing. Broad majorities
of Republicans and independents also approve of the senators’ work.
“It’s
a classic contrast in American politics — even when the people give Congress as
a whole abysmal marks, they tend to say that their own state’s senators and
representatives are doing a good job,” said Reineke.
Poll
data were collected from Feb. 11–19 via telephone interviews of 650 Tennessee
adults conducted by Issues and Answers Network Inc. using balanced, random
samples of Tennessee landline and cell phones. The data were weighted to match
the latest available Census estimates of gender and race proportions in
Tennessee.
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