Pollster.com

I guess the honeymoon is officially over.

His average approval on domestic issues is only 40%. It is only 35% if you remove education which he hasn't even addressed yet.

These numbers also show that he is still more popular than his initiatives. The composite average approval of the above is only 44% and yet Gallup shows his overall job approval at 51%. His attitude and stage presence will determine how much that 7% gap shrinks. It will be an interesting year.

@Gary

Averaging the approval ratings across various issues is not a good measure. That would assume voters cared about each issue equally, which they do not.

Overall job performance numbers consist of more than just the job performance on individual issues. Character impressions (leadership, honesty, cares about people like you) and personal favorability are often much more closely correlated with an elected officials overall job approval than a list of issues.

There are a few more interesting tidbits when I dug deeper into the details of the poll.

As is usual with Gallup, this poll seems to have oversampled Democrats. By my calculations, this poll would have to have included about 43% democrats in order for the composite figures to work out to the figures broken down by party ID. That's pretty consistent since their poll always shows Obama's approval above the composite trend line.

The low approval from Republicans is expected, but these approvals are approaching the approvals numbers Democrats had for Bush at his lowest point. I don't think anyone thought they would fall this far this fast.

The extremely low approval from independents has to be the most troubling for Democrats. A 35% composite approval? A 26% approval on domestic (not including education)? Those are horrible.

We'll see over the next few months how closely his approval is attached to the economy. He appears to have possibly gotten a 2% - 3% bounce from the unemployment rate dropping to 9.7% but we'll have to see if that lasts any longer than his state of the union bounce (which seemed to disappear in about 4 days).

Chris: I know you can't simply average out the individual categories to come up with an overall approval but it shows that he is more popular than any of the issues with the exception of education.