WASHINGTON (CNN) – What a difference a few months — and a presidential re-election victory — makes.
A new CNN Poll of Polls indicates that President Barack Obama‘s approval rating stands at 52 percent, with 43 percent of Americans saying they disapprove of the job the president‘s doing in the White House.
That’s a slight improvement for Obama since the summer. In most national surveys, the president‘s approval rating stood in the 40’s for much of 2010, 2011, and for the first half of this year. The president‘s numbers started reaching or slightly cracking the 50 percent mark in some polls over the summer and early autumn, and he’s been at 50 percent or over 50 percent the past two months in many national surveys.
This latest edition of the CNN Poll of Polls was compiled and released on Thursday. It’s an average of five national non-partisan, live operator surveys of the president‘s approval rating conducted in December: Gallup daily tracking poll (December 9-11); Bloomberg National Poll (December 7-10); NBC News/Wall Street Journal (December 6-9); Marist/McClatchy (December 4-6); and Politico/George Washington University (December 2-6).
The Poll of Polls does not have a sampling error.
“The most up-to-date vote count now has Obama at 51 percent of the popular vote, a bit higher than where he stood on Election Night because a number of blue states had not finished counting absentee ballots,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “That may indicate that the president has maintained the same majority coalition that won him a second term, but that he has not yet been able to build additional support beyond that coalition since the election.”
The president‘s post-election approval rating is in the same ballpark as his predecessor. President George W. Bush was right around the 50 percent mark in many polls conducted the month after his November 2004 re-election.
