Gallup’s interactive “Presidential Job Approval Center” has some great tools, but using their widget, one can only compare four trend lines (ie., the job approval ratings of four presidents) at a time — it would be nice to see a more comprehensive visual comparison. Using Gallup’s data, I played around in Excel and Illustrator and created the following chart.
The chart details each president’s job approval at 460 days in office (the length of Obama’s current tenure), each president’s all-time high and all-time low approval rating, and average approval rating. You can tell at a glance which presidents experienced the most tumultuous terms: Truman, LBJ, Nixon, and G.W. Bush each have wide spans from highest to lowest approval ratings, and quite different “current” (460 days in) ratings than their eventual averages.
Our new Visual History of the American Presidency contains a column in which the presidents are ranked on a one- to five-star scale; I included our rankings in the chart below, along the x-axis (there are no five-star-ranked presidents in this time period).
Click to view full size.
So what do you think? Is this chart a useful visualization of Gallup’s data? Did we get the rankings right?
The dichotomy of the last four presidents is surprising. From Truman through Reagan, there is a gentle curve; then HWBush jumps and the graph spikes up and down. WBush was riding the bump of 11September though. The contrast between Truman and Eisenhower is surprising as well.
I have a moral-political blog and am looking for a widget showing presidential approval rating, as well as other confidence stats. Anyone know of a source?
Thanks,
Lou Peterson
MyLiveWords.com