Just months after Barack Obama left the Oval Office, views of his tenure as president have improved modestly across a variety of issues, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.
Obama’s overall approval rating ― 49 percent in the survey ― remains virtually identical to the 48 percent he scored in a late December poll.
But Americans now give the former president more positive ratings for his handling of a number of issues.
Forty-seven percent of Americans now approve of the work Obama did to help people like them, up from 41 percent in December. While his ratings for addressing the way things work in Washington, at 39 percent, remains among his lowest, it’s up from 32 percent last year.
Obama also saw modestly improved ratings on immigration, social issues, the economy and health care.
It’s not uncommon for former presidents’ ratings to rise once they leave office.
“Americans tend to be more charitable in their evaluations of past presidents than they are when the presidents are in office,” Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones noted in 2013. “Former presidents likely transcend politics when they leave office, moving into a more nonpolitical role compared with the highly political environment in which presidents operate. And Americans’ retrospective views of presidents may focus more on their accomplishments as president rather than the day-to-day political decisions or the state of the nation that are big influences on their approval ratings while in office.”
Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted June 2-4 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.