Barely one-third of Arizona voters say they would give President Bush a second term, a statewide poll revealed Thursday.

The 34 percent support for his re-election, with 44 percent preferring someone else and 22 percent undecided, reflects a dramatic plunge in popularity for Bush. In 2000, he beat Al Gore in Arizona by a margin of 6 percentage points, or nearly 100,000 votes of 1.5 million cast.

State Democratic Chairman Jim Pederson said the poll results are evidence that Arizonans are "increasingly frustrated with the Bush administration's performance on both the foreign and domestic fronts."

But Bob Fannin, state Republican chairman, said Bush enjoyed unsustainably high ratings earlier this year, and party leaders had predicted a decline. The drop fits a pattern seen at this point in the first terms of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, he said.

Fannin also dismissed the poll results as an abstraction, because the election is more than 13 months away and no opponent has been chosen.

Both parties' interpretations are valid, said Bruce Merrill, the Arizona State University journalism professor who conducted the poll for Channel 8 (KAET-TV) and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

"Polls measure opinions at a particular point in time," he said, "and things can change virtually instantly."

Still, the results show that "in the short term, he (Bush) is in a difficult situation, and parallels with his father are real." After the 1991 Gulf War, the elder Bush's ratings soared, but an eroding economy led to his defeat in 1992.

The poll also found that slightly more than half (52 percent) of respondents opposed providing $87 billion, as Bush has requested, for continued military presence and reconstruction in Iraq. Forty-two percent supported the request, and 6 percent were undecided.

A total of 390 registered voters were surveyed statewide. Results have a sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Merrill said polls in Arizona often turn out to be within 2 or 3 percentage points of findings in nationwide polls.

Copyright 2003, azcentral.com

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