Saturday, April 12, 2014
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that 49% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Obama's job performance. Fifty percent (50%) disapprove (see trends).
The latest figures include 24% who Strongly Approve of the way Obama is performing as president and 39% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15.
See “What They Told Us” in surveys this past week.
Just 19% of voters believe the federal government today has the consent of the governed.
Only 29% of Likely Republican Voters think Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing GOP values over the past several years. By contrast, 63% of Likely Democratic Voters believe their representatives in Congress have done a good job representing their party's values.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin has a double-digit lead over his Republican challenger, State Senator Jim Oberweis, in Rasmussen Reports’ first look at the 2014 U.S. Senate race in Illinois.
Seventy percent (70%) of voters nationwide think most people run for Congress for the power more than anything else. Just 15% believe they run because they want to serve the public.
(More below)
Seventy-two percent (72%) of voters feel that when people move to this country from other parts of the world they should adopt America’s culture, language and heritage.
Forty-four percent (44%) of Americans feel it’s too easy to file a lawsuit in the United States.
Fifty-seven percent (57%) consider lawyers less ethical than those in other professions.
(More below)
Some readers wonder how we come up with our job approval ratings for the president since they often don’t show as dramatic a change as some other pollsters do. It depends on how you ask the question and whom you ask.
To get a sense of longer-term job approval trends for the president, Rasmussen Reports compiles our tracking data on a full month-by-month basis.
Rasmussen Reports has been a pioneer in the use of automated telephone polling techniques, but many other firms still utilize their own operator-assisted technology (see methodology).
Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. To reach those who have abandoned traditional landline telephones, Rasmussen Reports uses an online survey tool to interview randomly selected participants from a demographically diverse panel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.