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" Heading into tonight&amp;#039;s debate, which will focus on domestic policy, President Obama faces a daunting fact: according to the latest results from the exclusive Esquire/Yahoo! News poll, 45 percent of Americans believe that the president has mismanaged job creation. A roughly equal number (49 percent) say he&amp;#039;s done as well as he could given the circumstances....  That finding, which amounts to a statistical tie among the general population, is roughly the same when we limit our pool to likely voters (with 47 percent saying Obama&amp;#039;s done as well as he could and 48 percent claiming mismanagement). Were this another president at another time, those numbers might have been enough to propel Mitt Romney to an easy victory. (It worked for Bill Clinton, who unseated George H.W. Bush thanks to an unemployment rate of around 7.4 percent.) But ahead of the debate and the release of the latest jobs numbers on Friday, Obama has two things working his favor: GEORGE W. BUSH... Our survey shows that more Americans (26 percent) hold the former president responsible for the current level of unemployment than Obama (17 percent). So even if the country is split on the president&amp;#039;s performance as a job creator, 72 percent of the general population is not yet ready to blame the whole mess on him.  ...AND MITT ROMNEY: Despite Ann Romney&amp;#039;s tales of tough times in her convention speech, Romney still cannot convince Americans that he understands their problems as well as Obama.  When we break down the results of that question according to gender, geographic region, and age, Obama outpolls Romney across the board by double digits, except when he statistically ties Obama with Americans fifty and older. This can partly be explained by the fact that 74 percent of Americans say they have little or nothing in common with Romney. But it might also be understood through another set of questions in our survey: how responsible each candidate has been for his own success in life.  For both Romney and Obama, we looked to two sources of possible advantages \u2014 with Romney, his family&amp;#039;s wealth and connections, dating back to his father&amp;#039;s tenures as president of American Motors and as governor of Michigan; with Obama, affirmative-action programs that may have played a role in his admission to college and law school \u2014 and Americans see the influences of those potential factors in very different lights: 85 percent think Romney got a lot or some help from his family&amp;#039;s wealth and connections while 54 percent think Obama benefited a lot or some from affirmative-action programs.    Given the disparity in how people perceive those possible influences \u2014 62 percent see affirmative action in a positive light compared to 44 percent who think the same of family wealth and connections \u2014 you see the depth of Romney&amp;#039;s challenges in relating to the average American. Click here for the full results of these survey questions, and check out Yahoo! News for more. We invite you to check back next week on The Politics Blog for the full results of the complete survey. METHODOLOGY This Esquire/Yahoo! Poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone Sept. 7-10, 2012, among a random national sample of 1,002 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for the full sample, 4.5 points for registered voters and 5 points for likely voters. The survey was produced for Esquire/Yahoo! News by Langer Research Associates, with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Interviewing Service of America of Van Nuys, Calif. PREVIOUS FINDINGS FROM THE ESQUIRE/YAHOO! NEWS POLL: \u2022 Who&amp;#039;s a Bigger Liar? Romney by a Nose (Plus: Majority Says Obama Hasn&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;Failed&amp;quot;) \u2022 3 in 4 Americans: We&amp;#039;re Not Like Romney (Plus: Americans Trust Obama in War) \u2022 Obama Up by 4 Among Likely Voters (58% of Americans Take Him in a Fight)  (Chart Design by Katelyn MacLachlan for The Politics Blog) Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a16096/romney-obama-job-poll-numbers-2012/>