President Barack Obama’s approval rating is at 55 percent, the highest it has been during his second term and tying the all-time high of his presidency, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Thursday.
Obama has reached such a high approval rating twice before: in January 2013 before his second inauguration, and in January 2011.
In October 2008, Gallup measured former President George W. Bush’s approval rating at just 25 percent as the U.S. economy began to collapse.
The CNN/ORC poll found that just 13 percent of Republicans approve of the job Obama is doing, barely an increase from the 11 percent who approved in September 2015. Among white Americans, his approval has increased to 47 percent from just 32 percent a year ago. Eighty-six percent of black Americans and 68 percent of Hispanic Americans approve of the president, the poll found.
According to HuffPost Pollster, which aggregates publicly available polling data, 50.9 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance, while 46.4 percent disapprove.
Obama’s high marks come as his presidency winds down, and as presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump battle on the campaign trail about his legacy. Clinton has said she wants to build on many of Obama’s initiatives, but Trump has said he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act and undo other key accomplishments of his presidency.
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