President Obama’s overall poll numbers with average Americans may have dumped in recent months to all-time lows — but the news gets even worse with working-class whites, who see him as a near-insufferable failure.
Gallup finds this segment of society — the white, non-college graduate bunch — only gives Mr. Obama a 27 percent thumbs-up for job performance.
White college graduates give him a slightly better nod, the poll reported. About 41 percent of this grouping say they agree with Mr. Obama’s job performance — about the same figure recorded for average America over the last few months, various polls showed.
Gallup also found that “Democrats and the president do better among white women than among white men,” and that again, education level plays a factor, For example, the president’s approval rating hits a high of 45 percent among white female college graduates — but drops to a low of 25 percent among white male non-college graduates.
And with whites, youth plays into the approval ratings, too.
“Obama does better with younger Americans than with those who are older, but the education gap is evident across all age groups,” Gallup reported.
By the numbers: The president’s approval among 18- to 29-year-old white college graduates is 17 points higher than the rating given by those in the same age grouping, but of non-college graduate status, Gallup reported.
Why care?
“Given its sheer size, the working-class white population in the U.S. is of keen importance to politicians and strategists on both sides of the aisle, and many discussions and strategy sessions have focused on the complex set of attitudes and life positions which, as evidenced by these data, have pushed this group further from the Democratic president over the past six years,” Gallup said.
The findings are based on telephone interviews conducted from 2009 through October 2014, with random samples of 355,000 adults, ages 18 and older. The margin of sampling error for one aspect of the poll — the results that were based on the total sample of adults in each yearly average — is plus-or-minus 1 percentage point.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.