National

Bush Ends Year with High Approval Ratings

By Don Gonyea

Published December 23, 2003 at 9:00 PM PST

This story was published more than 20 years ago.

With the arrest of Saddam Hussein and positive reports about the U.S. economy, President Bush is ending the year with his approval ratings on the rise. The numbers suggest Bush is in a strong position as he enters the 2004 election year, but polls have fluctuated wildly over the past year. NPR's Don Gonyea reports.

National

Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.