The survey, by Morning Consult, put the Democratic governor’s 29 percent approval rating above only Republican Gov.
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The 59-year-old two-term Republican governor and former US senator was once the darling of the Tea Party and seemed to have limitless possibilities in politics.
Brownback, in the middle of a second term after winning re-election in 2014, has taken a beating in the deep-red state as budget deficits inspired by a supply-side income tax cut led to a sharp sales tax increase past year and to multiple rounds of spending reductions.
Despite the public furor over the Flint water crisis, Michigan’s governor is a smidgen more popular than Connecticut’s Dannel P. Malloy.
Malloy’s current numbers are so bad, he is disliked by the state’s residents more than beleaguered Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is disliked by his constituency.
The results are similar to an October Quinnipiac Poll that found 32 percent of CT voters approved of the job Malloy was doing as governor.
The poll was a mixed bag for Republicans, who occupied eight of the top-10 and eight of the bottom-10 spots on the list. Baker, 59, is a former businessman and state secretary of health and administration. Baker has maintained remarkably high popularity ratings since being elected by a slim margin as a moderate Republican in 2014. America’s least popular governor is Republican Gov. Sam Brownback in Kansas, who is embroiled in ongoing budget woes that followed large tax cuts. Hogan, 59, is only the second Republican governor of Maryland in almost a half century.
The survey found that of the six governors running for reelection this year, most enjoy a roughly 50 percent approval rating. That includes North Carolina Gov. The two exceptions are Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican.
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A total of 66,000 voters were surveyed in all 50 states by the political metrics website, which used different sample sizes in each state based on Census data. Here are the five least popular governors, and the five most.
