The first poll I look to for presidential job approval is the Gallup poll. I don’t know whether Gallup offers the best gauge of presidential support. Indeed, nobody can really know: the poll surveys support/opposition among all adults, and there is no independent arbiter to decide which pollster gets it right (contrast this with the exit polls, which can check how pre-election “likely voter” polls performed). Instead, Gallup is my first choice because it is the oldest. We can look at historical performance in the Gallup poll dating back to FDR, and thus get a sense of where President Obama stands relative to his predecessors in the same poll. On top of that, Gallup’s numbers are usually reasonable, and the outfit is extremely generous in its provision of free cross-tab data. 

The day-to-day Gallup tracking poll is extremely bouncy, but on a week-to-week basis the random fluctuations typically cancel each other out, and so it offers my most trusted snapshot of public opinion among all adults. Last week, the Gallup poll had the president’s job approval at 47 percent, compared to 45 percent disapproving. This is the lowest it has been since Christmas, and it means that most (but not all) of his post-Election bounce has disappeared.