It turns out that President Bush may not be as large an albatross around John McCain’s neck as many people think, after all.

One big unknown has been how much the president’s low poll ratings – his job approval is almost as poor as that of King George III among the colonists 240 years ago – would badly hurt the Republican nominee’s chances this November.

The theory pushed hard by Democrats and accepted to some degree by Republicans is that the public is so angry with Bush that large numbers of voters will refuse to vote for a fellow Republican.

The reality is a bit more complicated and perhaps not quite as ominous for de facto GOP nominee McCain as many might think. He’s got a problem but not a monstrous one.

First of all, McCain is running competitively in trial heats against either Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York or Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who are fighting for the Democratic nomination. McCain’s closeness in these national and key state polls is an early indication that there aren’t that many people who might be taking out their Bush anger on the GOP candidate.

Moreover, detailed polling in the three most important states in the Electoral College shows the vast majority of those who say their frustration with Bush has turned them off to McCain are voters unlikely to vote Republican in the first place.

Nevertheless, the Quinnipiac University polls last month of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania voters did find that roughly one-fifth of independents say they won’t vote for a Republican nominee because of the current GOP president. And by a 3-1 ratio, voters say Bush’s tenure makes them less likely, rather than more likely, to vote Republican this November.

That’s bad news for McCain, given the importance that independent voters play in close national elections. No doubt having one-fifth of them predisposed against him is a problem. The good news is that the figure isn’t higher, and he has time to persuade those voters to cast their vote based on the names that are on the ballot.

It is Bush’s widespread unpopularity that has led most analysts to conclude that the playing field is tilted toward the eventual Democratic nominee this November.

To be sure, the public unhappiness with the war in Iraq (in some ways just another way of measuring Bush’s unpopularity) and the faltering economy are also good reasons many see the election as the Democrats’ to lose.

Yet the bottom line is Bush and how much of a headwind he is creating for McCain.

No one has been elected president since John F. Kennedy in 1960 who did not carry two of Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio. The Quinnipiac polls last month found that McCain is very narrowly ahead of Democrats in both Ohio and Florida.

But more germane to the question of Bush’s ability to hurt McCain and boost the eventual Democratic nominee were the answers voters in those three states gave when asked if they agreed with the following statement:

“I am so angry at President Bush that I will not vote for Republican John McCain for president this November.” In general, about 5 percent of Republicans and more than 40 percent of Democrats agreed, but those figures should be neither surprising nor terribly worrisome to McCain.

The numbers for independents – the swing voters in most elections – were larger. In Florida, 22 percent of independents agreed with that statement; in Ohio, 19 percent agreed; and in Pennsylvania, 16 percent agreed.

But further analysis found that most of the independents who agreed were Democratic leaners, and relatively few of them had actually voted for Bush in 2004.

In Ohio, 72 percent of independents who agreed with the statement identified as Democratic leaners, and 9 percent said they did not lean toward either party. The comparable figures were 70 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in Florida and 75 percent and 12 percent, respectively, in Pennsylvania.

Looking at it another way, only about 5 percent of those who said they had voted for Bush in 2004 said they would not vote for McCain.

Another question asked found that across the three key states, an average of 27 percent (heavily made up of Democrats) said Bush’s performance in office had made them less likely to vote for McCain, while 9 percent (mostly Republicans) said it had made them more likely.

At this point Bush is a weight on McCain’s shoulders, but it’s perhaps not as heavy as some had thought. In any event, McCain has seven months to make the case he is his own man.