Although he's won election twice in the Sunshine State, President Obama has never been exceedingly popular in Florida. That fact needs to be recognized when absorbing the new Quinnipiac poll released Friday morning that shows Obama's approval ratings in Florida seriously upside down, with only 40 percent of those surveyed supporting the president, and 57 percent disapproving of his job performance.
But let's not ignore reality. The president is at his political nadir, scoring hisworst poll ratings nationally as the debacle that is the introduction of the Affordable Care Act continues to stay in the headlines.
But the fact is, the 57 percent disapproval ranking in the state simply ties with what Floridians were thinking of Obama over two years ago (September of 2011 to be precise). And a Mason Dixon polltaken back in March 2010 also shows that Obama's approval ratings were down to 37 percent.
[jump]The president's struggles in Florida late in 2011 led some reporters (including yours truly) to openly speculate that dumping Joe Biden and bringing on Hillary Clinton as Vice President would be the move to get the president over the hump in one of the most competitive battleground states in the nation.
Obama didn't dump Biden (though it was considered, according to the new book Double Down), and he still beat Mitt Romney a year ago in Florida.
Pollster Peter Brown does ask the question that all Democrats have to be asking themselves today: Is this as low as it goes in terms of the president's popularity, or can he drop further?
"When things were going well for President Barack Obama, he enjoyed overwhelming support among women and either tied or was slightly ahead among men. Now the shoe is on the other foot. He's down 28 percentage points among men and eight points among women," said Brown. "He is losing independents by 30 points and losing by 40 points among white voters. Even one in six Democrats give him a thumbs down. The question for the president is whether he has hit bottom or whether, as happened when President George W. Bush's numbers reached this neighborhood, there is further downside to come?"
It was around this time in Bush 43's second term when all was lost. The trifecta of his plan to privatize Social Security, the open revolt amongst Republicans by his selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, and the response to Hurricane Katrina doomed Dubya, though there was something else driving the country's dissatisfaction with him and the Republican Party in general — the Iraq war. That dissatisfaction led to a huge wave election for Democrats in 2006, in which they surprisingly took back not only the Senate (which they lost after the 2002 election) but stunningly the House of Representatives, which they had not controlled since the Newt Gingrich revolutionary days of 1994.
Meanwhile, here's what the Quinnipiac polls say about 2016. Hillary Clinton would lead Jeb Bush by a couple of percentage points if they were the two candidates running for president in Florida tomorrow. Of course, there's not an election for three more years, and let's not forget how many people were contemplating a Clinton-Giuliani race as late as early 2007. That didn't work out, did it?
However, a deeper look inside the poll numbers shows that Bush scores only four percentage points higher than Marco Rubio as the choice of Florida Republicans today (22-18 percent) for the nomination. The two other potential candidates who score in double figures are Chris Christie, who takes in 14 points in the poll, and Ted Cruz, who gets 12 percent.
Clinton dominates the field among Democrats in Florida, leading Joe Biden by a walloping 70-9 percent margin. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been generating heat in the progressive community, gets 4 percent of the vote.