Thirty-Third Place!

MyDD.com has a link up to the SUSA approval ratings of all 50 governors. Governor Romney clocks in at 41% approve to 51% disapprove. For comparison, that puts him at 33rd out of 50 -- enough to keep him out of the bottom quartile, but still in the lower half of the popularity spectrum for governors.

Some interesting observations about the internals:

	Gender			Party
	Male	Female		Republican	Democrat	Independent
Approve	46%	37%		79%	19%	46%
Disapprove	49%	53%		18%	73%	47%

It looks like men are split on Romney but women are not particularly happy with him. I wonder if he'll run another one of those shirtless campaign ads. Notice also that the party breakdown is pretty much where state Democrats want it to be -- a vast majority of Dems disapprove of the governor and the unenrolled are at least split. If those disapprove numbers translate into votes for the Democratic nominee (a reasonable, but not necessarily safe assumption) then Romney is sunk.

Unless of course, Romney is no longer in the picture by November 2006. The governor has recently backed off his earlier rhetoric about running for re-election, and as we noted earlier, the rumors that he is going to skip town have intensified. Romney says he'll make his official announcement in the fall, but that would be a little too close for comfort, I think, for any Republicans who would then have to start a campaign from scratch.