The Presidents and Their Approval Ratings

On October 29, 2009, I posted a piece on imagery, which included several data visualizations. I am not interested in making this a political blog, but  I recently stumbled across an interesting interactive data visualization that I thought I'd post here.

This one shows the presidential approval ratings data for each US president since Harry Truman. There is a static screenshot below - go to USA Today's site to interact with the visualization, which you can adjust to compare specific presidents.

Interestingly, it shows repeated cycles of high approval at the outset of each Presidency followed by lower ratings at term's end, except for Presidents Clinton and Reagan. I wonder how the movement of the 9/11 terror trial to New York City, announced yesterday, will ultimately play out for Mr. Obama's approval ratings at the end of his term?

Nice job by William Couch, Kristen Novak, Michelle Price, and Joshua Hatch at USA Today.