As The Green Man has observed before, the achillies heel of the US military is the reluctance of the American public to accept deaths of US soldiers as a natural consequence of prosecuting a war. On this very issue it seems like the chickens are coming home to roost for GWB. Richard Eichenberg at Tufts University and Richard Stoll at Rice University report that George's chances of reelection are closely tied to casualty rates in Iraq. The death of 30 US soldiers in Iraq is accompanied by drop in 1% in Georges approval rating. On May 1, 2003, the approval of his handling of Iraq exceeded 70 percent, he has lost 30% of that so far and it is still falling as the death toll rises.

Richard Stoll, who is associate professor of political science at Tufts summarises his analysis thus

But many other events – both triumphs and setbacks – had virtually no statistical impact. Even the capture of Saddam Hussein, which generated substantial media coverage and did cause a visible upward movement in the Iraq approval series, did not have an impact that was statistically significant

In non-war times the US public generally rate a president on the performance of the economy. During war times, like now, they largely ignore this performance measure, which is unfortunate for Bush because right at the moment the US economy is in quite good shape.

Richard Eichenberg summarises the situation as follows:

The most surprising finding from our study is that the performance of the economy has had such little effect on evaluations of the president. This is a war presidency, plain and simple, and President Bush will stand or fall on the results of events in Iraq. If American soldiers continue to die, his re-election is in serious doubt.

Read more here.