Six in 10 Americans Want Obama’s Policies to Succeed, but Many Doubt They Will

I’d like to see 70-80% of the country on board to see the POTUS’ policies succeed…

Six out of 10 Americans hope that President Obama’s policies will succeed — a percentage that has dropped measurably from last year — but the public is roughly split when it comes to whether they think those policies will in fact be successful, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted Dec. 17-20.

Sixty-one percent want Obama’s program to succeed while 27 percent hope his policies fail. Nine percent have mixed feelings and 3 percent have no opinion. Last December, 71 percent hoped Obama’s policies would succeed compared to 22 percent who wanted them to fail. In March 2009, 86 percent wanted those policies to succeed and 11 percent hoped they would fail. The remainder had mixed opinions.

When it comes to what Americans believe will happen (putting aside whether or not they want Obama’s policies to succeed), 47 percent predict failure while 44 percent say they will succeed. Six percent have mixed opinions and 2 percent are undecided.

CNN polling director Keating Holland called the 61 percent who are in Obama’s corner “a fairly robust number” but singled out as significant the size of the drop-off in the number of those hoping for his success as well as the fact that a plurality predicts his policies will likely fail.

(A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted Dec. 9-13 said 64 percent were only somewhat confident or not at all confident that Obama had the right set of goals and policies to be president, while 36 percent were quite or extremely confident.)

The CNN poll said that one factor working in Obama’s favor is that whether Americans approve of the job he is doing or not, 73 percent approve of the president as a person.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said it was good for the country that the GOP had taken control of the House while 42 percent said it was bad, with 4 percent answering “neither” and 2 percent undecided. More…