Friday, August 28, 2009

Gallop: There’s no correlation between the Dow and Obama’s approval rating


Most Presidents poll numbers track closely with the Dow index. This is not true for President Obama. This is very strange. Please post a comment if you have an explanation.

From Gallop:
PRINCETON, NJ -- President Barack Obama's job approval rating has been steadily declining over the past several months at the same time that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been steadily increasing. This inverse relationship between job approval and the stock market is not a common pattern with recent presidents. In fact, Gallup's analysis of job approval ratings and the Dow going back to 1977 finds few sustained periods where the Dow and presidential approval were strongly related (either positively or negatively).

Even for Obama, the current pattern is only recent. In the early months of his administration, Obama's job approval was positively related to the Dow, rather than negatively related, as is the case currently. (The accompanying graph, and all other graphs in this story, displays Dow closing values and presidential job approval ratings indexed to the respective averages for each presidential administration. The Dow figures represent the closing averages for the first day of each poll, or the most recent day before the poll began if the stock market was closed on the day the poll began.)

2 comments:

Sean said...

Reading too much into it.

"In any case, Gallup trends suggest no systematic pattern by which Democratic presidents (who may be viewed on Wall Street as more anti-business than Republicans) find their job approval ratings inversely related to job approval, nor a consistent pattern by which Republican presidents find a positive correlation.

"More generally, from president to president, and from time period to time period within presidencies, the market and job approval ratings have moved in widely varying directions, displaying no systematic relationship."

Bluegrass Pundit said...

Sean said...

"Reading too much into it."

Perhaps. However, polls show investor confidence in Obama is lower than the general public.