WASHINGTON, May 16: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry topped President George W. Bush in a new opinion poll released on Sunday, one day after a separate survey showed a majority of Americans for the first time disapprove of Bush's leadership.

The Time/CNN poll showed 51 percent of likely voters favoured Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, over the Republican president, who had 46 percent of support.

With the addition of independent candidate Ralph Nader, who ran for the Green Party in 2000, in the survey, Kerry was favoured by 49 percent of voters and Bush by 44 percent. About 6 percent said they would vote for Nader.

The poll has a plus or minus 4.1 percentage point margin of error. The poll interviewed 1,001 people, including 563 likely voters, on May 12-13. A Newsweek magazine poll on Saturday showed that Bush's job approval rating had dropped to 42 percent, down from 49 percent in April.

And for the first time since he took office in January 2001, a majority of Americans, 52 percent, disapprove of him, according to the poll. The Time/CNN poll also showed a vertiginous drop in support for US military policy in Iraq.

The survey found that 41 percent of Americans somewhat or strongly approve of current military policy, down from 59 percent in December 2003. According to the poll, 49 percent strongly or somewhat disapprove of the military policy.

A minority of Americans - 32 percent - said Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign as a result of his handling of Iraq. The poll showed that 57 percent of Americans do not think he should step down. The survey was taken amid the ongoing Iraqi prison scandal. -AFP