bounce

WASHINGTON – President Bush's job-approval ratings have sunk so low - to 31 percent in two major polls - that it's time to pull out the history books.

Not only has he hit all-time lows for his own administration in both the Gallup and CBS/New York Times polls, he is also working his way up (or down) the all-time list of lowest job-approval scores. In the Gallup records, which go back to President Franklin Roosevelt, only Presidents Truman, Nixon, Carter, and George H.W. Bush hit lower points.

Perhaps most disturbing to Mr. Bush is that he is losing Republicans. The Gallup poll, released Monday, showed a 13-point drop in one week among self-identified Republicans, from 81 percent to 68 percent. Frank Newport, Gallup's editor in chief, cautions against overinterpreting those numbers, given the size of the Republican sample (about one-third of those polled) in any single survey. That number has dipped before and bounced back. But polling experts agree that the overall trend is evident.

"Clearly, he's lost ground among Republicans; all the pollsters are seeing that," says Karlyn Bowman, an expert on polls at the American Enterprise Institute. "Now he is just holding onto his base ... the people who are with you when you're wrong or with you when things are going terribly."