WASHINGTON — President Bush's approval rating has reached its highest level since January, helping to boost the Republican Party's image across a range of domestic and national security issues just seven weeks before this year's midterm election, a new Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
The survey spotlights a continuing array of Republican vulnerabilities, but it also offers the first evidence in months that the GOP may be gaining momentum before November's battle for control of Congress.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday September 22, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 56 words Type of Material: Correction
Poll graphic: In Thursday's Section A, a pie chart within the poll graphic, "Bush, Iraq and midterm elections" was mislabeled. Under the question "All in all, do you think the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over?" the captions for "Yes 38%" and "No 57%" pointed to the wrong portions of the pie chart.
Democrats hold a lead in the poll, 49% to 39%, when registered voters are asked which party they intend to support for Congress this year. But that advantage may rest on softening ground: On virtually every comparison between the parties measured in the survey, Republicans have improved their position since early summer.
In particular, Republicans have nearly doubled their advantage when voters are asked which party they trust most to protect the nation against terrorism -- the thrust of Bush's public relations blitz in recent weeks.
"I believe he has made the country more secure," said R.C. Cox, a police officer from North Little Rock, Ark., who responded to the survey and categorized himself as a political independent. "President Bush has stuck with a nonpopular plan throughout this, and he has been relentless in what he has done."
The shift in the wind hasn't dispelled all of the GOP's problems. Along with a plurality of voters saying they want Democrats to control Congress, most say they disapprove of Bush's overall job performance. And the percentage of voters who say they believe their own representative in Congress deserves reelection is lower than in the weeks before a Republican landslide overturned Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in 1994.
But the results suggest that a combination of improving attitudes about the economy and the president's focus on national security issues has ended the nearly unbroken slide in the GOP's public standing through Bush's tumultuous second term -- and created the conditions for a highly competitive battle in this year's election.
The Times/Bloomberg poll, supervised by Susan Pinkus, director of The Times Poll, surveyed 1,517 adults, including 1,347 registered voters, Saturday through Tuesday. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
