Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s approval rating was little changed in a Quinnipiac University poll this month, leaving him the least-popular state leader in the school’s surveys of the past two months.
Almost 40 percent of Floridians polled said the first-term Republican was doing a good job compared with 35 percent in August, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said today. The September number is up from Scott’s 29 percent low in May.
“Scott certainly has a long way to go till he can see the breakeven point, but his ratings that dropped to awful are now just bad,” Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Hamden, Conn.-based institute, said in a statement.
The 58-year-old former healthcare executive, who campaigned on cutting government spending and supporting private job growth, was elected in November with less than half the votes cast.
He signed a $69.1 billion budget in May that’s more than $1 billion smaller than last year’s. It called for state employees to contribute 3 percent of their salaries to the pension system, cut education spending $542 per student and lowered corporate income taxes by about $300 million.
Forty-one percent of voters surveyed by Quinnipiac thought the budget was fair to people like them, compared with 33 percent in August and 29 percent in May.
Quinnipiac surveys about other Republican governors showed New Jersey’s Chris Christie had a 47 percent approval rating in a survey released Aug. 17; Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett had a 44 percent rating in a poll Aug. 3, and Virginia’s Bob McDonnell had 61 percent in a Sept. 14 survey.
Among Democrats, Dan Malloy of Connecticut had a 41 percent approval rating in Quinnipiac’s Sept. 15 poll, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo scored 66 percent on Sept 20.
The institute hasn’t polled voters in Ohio since July, when 35 percent approved of Republican Gov, John Kasich’s job performance.
Quinnipiac interviewed 1,007 Florida registered voters by telephone from Sept. 14-19. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
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