The frontrunners in the 2012 election race like to label
Barack Obama a one-term president, and new reports suggest that prediction
might be more likely than ever.

Obama’s approval rating is now lower than that of Jimmy
Carter before he lost a second chance at the White House.

Obama

Using data on the approval rating of US presidents collected
from Gallup polling, US News & World Report has recently revealed that
American’s favor the job approval of current-President Barack Obama less than
they did of Jimmy Carter during the same point in his administration that
lasted but a mere one-term.

Just shy of entering his fourth year in the Oval Office,
President Obama’s current rating is 43 percent; in 1979, President Carter was
favored by only 51 percent of Americans. In the case of President Carter, he
was crushed in the polls a year later during the election of 1980, with
Republican candidate Ronald Reagan captured 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49.

Support for Obama has been waning during the last few months
of his administration, with a poll conducted by Quinnipiac University this fall
revealing that his disapproval rating reached a peak of 55 percent. Other
recent polls by Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal (in conjunction
with ABC News and NBC News, respectively), also suggested that his disapproval
rating was above 50 percent. A Gallup survey in August said that Obama’s actual
job approval rating was that of 39 percent.

In the US News article, Gallup data has also concluded that
Obama’s average approval rating throughout his presidency has hovered at 49
percent, with only three other presidents faring worse at this time in their
own presidency: Carter, Gerald Ford and Harry S Truman. Ford also served but
one term.