How President Obama can win – without approval

Barack Obama waves before boarding his bus outside in Cannon Falls, Minnesota; faced with his worst approval figure yet, the president went on the road to drum up support in key midwest battleground states. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Issues of the day, and the questions pollsters ask about them, vary over time, but one poll has been a staple of our political media discourse for decades: the presidential approval rating. The question is typically formulated as "Do you approve or disapprove of how the president is handling his job?" and the question is asked regularly enough that you can track its response over time. So it is considered big news when a president's approval rating spikes – as President Obama's did after the death of Osama bin Laden – or dips, as it has during the recent debt ceiling and credit rating downgrade debacle. According to the most recent poll, Obama has hit an all-time low of 39%.

But what does this mean? It's not necessarily as dire as you might think. First of all, the US president isn't elected in a national vote, but rather via a series of winner-take-all statewide elections. In this context, the more important question for Obama than his national number is how he is performing in key swing states. Currently, he outperforms his national numbers in the crucial battleground of upper midwest states such as Minnesota and Iowa. Obama may also get a boost from unpopular extremist Republican governors in important swing states such as Florida (Rick Scott), Ohio (John Kasich) and Wisconsin (Scott Walker).

Approval numbers also oversimplify a complicated electorate. Throughout the healthcare reform debate, conservative commentators pointed to numbers showing a slight plurality of the public "disapproving" of Obama's handling of healthcare. But that was misleading, because liberals who wished Obama would promote a more left-leaning version of healthcare reform were included in that number. If you combined the people who liked healthcare reform with the people who thought it didn't go far enough, you had a strong pro-reform majority. Likewise, liberals who think Obama has been too moderate or weak-kneed may say they disapprove of Obama's job performance – but that hardly means they are going to vote Republican in 2012.

Elections are choices, and it's entirely possible for voters to dislike Obama but dislike his opponent even more. Congress, and congressional Republicans, are more unpopular, according to polling, than Obama is.

Obama still has plenty of time to improve upon his numbers. Two recent two-term presidents, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, had even lower approval ratings at the same juncture in their first term.

Even so, Obama's approval rating is legitimate cause for concern among his staffers and supporters. No president has won re-election with a Gallup approval rating of 47% or less. The closest anyone has come was President George W Bush, who won re-election in 2004 with an approval rating of only 48%.

What was his secret? Relentlessly smearing his opponent, Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts), a decorated war veteran, as a "Massachusetts liberal" and an unpatriotic "flip-flopper". By turning some voters who didn't care for Bush into anti-Kerry voters, and boosting turnout among his base, he won.

So, as Politico reports, Obama may adopt the same strategy against the Republican nominee. High-minded liberals may find that distasteful, but if they want to win, they may have no choice.