The president is pretty popular all things considered.
Ed Kilgore had some fun yesterday poking fun at our chattering classes’ theory of a second term collapse in Obama’s popularity:
While we are staring at Obama’s numbers, it’s worth taking a look at some of the internals, particularly as they bear witness to the accuracy of some of the more common “narratives” about Obama. In the last weekly Gallup summary (in which the president’s overall ratio was still underwater at 46/49), the national approval ratio was being pulled down by a remarkable single-digit (8%) approval rating from self-identified Republicans. But among Democrats, who are supposedly on the brink of a “struggle for the soul of the party,” and ideologically riven between Elizabeth Warren “populists” and Obama/Clinton “centrists,” Obama’s approval rating stands at 81%. And looking deeper, he’s at 86% among self-identified “liberal Democrats,” 78% among “moderate Democrats,” and yes, 67% among “conservative Democrats,” such as they are. Among self-identified indies (who lean Republican these days), Obama is at a sluggish but not disastrous 44%; at this point in W.’s presidency he had dropped to 28% among indies, and was at a relatively unimpressive 70% among Republicans, who had been toasting him as a world-historical figure just a few years earlier.
Obama of course is nowhere near the sky high approval ratings of Bill Clinton in the last few years of his administration, but compared to other second term presidents like LBJ or Richard Nixon, let alone George W. Bush, he’s still doing pretty well. This is sort of what we’d expect given the steadily improving economy and a lack of shutdowns and other self created crises which we’ve seen a lot of over the last few years.
Either way things could be looking a lot worse for Hillary Clinton.
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