Pure Michigan: MSU Survey Shows Governor Snyder Has Lowest Approval Ratings in the Nation

by P.D. Lesko

For the past year, Governor Rick Snyder has been getting pretty much everything he wanted from the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. Together, the state’s Republicans have been accused of legislatively sucker punching the state’s working poor and public employees, and toiling mightily to strip almost half of the state’s black residents of their right to be represented by their own elected officials. Snyder has been selling his patented “happy talk,” proven to create jobs, cure dyspepsia, bursitis, bunions and economic Depressions. The Governor has also been compulsively singing the Johnny Mercer classic “Ac-Cen-Tuate The Positive” to any news outlet, elected official or homeless single mother who will listen. If you’re among the 81 percent of state residents who are sick and tired of listening to Governor Snyder, you can listen to Mercer below.

Despite Snyder’s efforts to sing louder, over the past year the state’s residents, including members of Snyder’s own Republican party, have become increasingly tone deaf and, as a result, disillusioned with his performance. It should come as no shock that Governor Rick Snyder’s approval continues to plummet among Michigan residents. This is according to survey results released by Michigan State University’s ‘State of the State’ poll. The numbers show only about one in five residents give the governor an “excellent” or “good” rating.  Snyder’s approval rating was about double that in January 2011.

Mlive.com reports:

The Fall 2011 State of the State survey conducted by the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University found that only 19.3 percent of Michigan residents surveyed rated the governor’s performance as excellent or good, continuing a decline in popularity from 44.5 percent just after his election to 31.5 percent in the Spring, 2011 survey.

Charles Ballard directs the State of the State survey. He told Michigan Radio that Snyder’s support among his Republican base is eroding: “The percentage of the Republicans who gave either an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’  to Governor Snyder was cut in half.  From the mid-60’s to the low 30’s…that’s a really big drop.”

With only 19 percent of state residents willing to rate Snyder’s performance as “good” or “excellent,” this means that Michigan’s Republican Nerd-in-Chief is now the governor with the lowest approval ratings in the entire United States. Democrat Jennifer Granholm’s approval ratings were also among the lowest of any U.S. Governor. In 2007, only 32 percent of the state’s residents approved of her job performance. The same survey concluded that only 18 percent of Michigan residents thought the state’s legislature was doing a good job in 2007.

Snyder’s bad news buffet is, of course, excellent news for Neil Abercrombie. Abercrombie, the governor of Hawaii, it was reported in October 2011, had the worst approval ratings of any governor in the United States. Florida Governor Rick Scott can now breathe a sigh of relief as well, as Snyder’s approval ratings make Scott’s recent 28 percent approval rating look positively glowing.

Michigan and national political analysts are taking bets on whether Governor Rick Snyder’s approval ratings could hit single digits before 2012. Of course, the U.S. Congress is already there. An October 25, 2011 New York Times/CBS News poll finds the approval rate for Congress at just 9 percent, with 84 percent disapproving.