And what are the 22% thinking?

Frankly, it takes talent to suck this bad:

President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush's final approval rating at 22 percent.

Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.

Mr. Bush's final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.

Only 6 percent of Democrats approve of the job he has done as president, while 57 percent of Republicans approve. Eighteen percent of independents approve.

The door. Don’t let it hit you.

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This poll was conducted among a random sample of 1,112 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone January 11-15, 2009. Phone numbers were dialed from RDD samples of both standard land-lines and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher.

Given the current economic situation and the topic of the poll, I wonder if telephone interviews are appropriate for sampling the population. I don't really know how many voters in the US don't own phones, but it would seem plausible to suggest that poor voters are underrepresented. So maybe 22% is still too high an estimate...

Miguel : It's not hard to own a cell phone in this country.
You can buy a pre-loaded one for $20.00 at almost any convenience store. Given that, and that they dialed semi-random numbers, the pollsters had to hit some poor people.
Personally, I think it just goes to prove the age-old political axiom that a certain percentage of the voters will stick by their man no matter what he does. Just as a similar percentage would vote for their party even if proving the existence of Extra-terrestrial visitors was one of the primary platform planks.
I wonder what Richard Nixon's approval ratings were when he left office ? Or Jimmy Carter's, or Franklin Pierce's

George Bush Sr, had terrible ratings when he left. He vowed, "no new taxes" but caved in, and raised them. The economy then went into a recession, and generally when the economy is bad, the approval rating goes way down.

The banking crisis was a major factor in Bush's demise in the recent poll. Stocks went down like a rock, and it's still in a downward trend. High oil prices, was another factor, nobody will guess who is the biggest oil company in America in here...lol...I didn't guess it either...lol...It's Morgan Stanley which owns like 15 percent of the world's market in oil. Banks were investing in oil futures to make money for the clients while telling the public it was all demand. Yet demand was declining while oil prices were going up. It was a mess all the way around which is why Bush ratings is so low.