Rare Contributor
Rasmussen Reports delivered its latest daily presidential tracking poll Friday, which also happens to be the last one of the year, and the poll may surprise some of President Donald Trump’s critics.
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According to the poll, 45 percent of United States citizens approve of the job President Trump is doing and 53 percent disapprove – those numbers are nearly identical to former President Barack Obama’s approval/disapproval rating at the end of his first year in office. At the end of 2009, Obama had an approval rating of 46 percent and a disapproval rating of 53 percent.
Considering Trump’s tumultuous year, his last poll of the year isn’t a bad way to end 2017. The president’s approval rating, according to Rasmussen, bottomed out at 38 percent in August.
Former President Obama ended his first year in office with a similar approval rating, but his approval rating, according to Rasmussen, never dropped quite as low as Trump’s did.
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Even President Trump tweeted about catching up to Obama in the polls. “While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, @foxandfriends just showed that my rating on Dec. 28, 2017, was approximately the same as President Obama on Dec. 28, 2009, which was 47%…and this despite massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!” he tweeted Friday.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/946724075157651457
However, Trump and Obama’s Rasmussen approval rating doesn’t match up to a lot of other polls – Gallup, for instance, has Trump with an approval rating of 38 percent and a disapproval rating of 56 percent. Critics have pointed out that Rasmussen polls give Republicans an edge because they only poll likely voters – not the public at large, and likely voters tend to be heavily Republican since they vote more regularly.
According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, President Trump’s approval rating for Dec. 10-Dec. 29, overall, currently stands at 39.8 percent while his disproval rating stands at 55.7 percent. Obama, on the other hand, ended his first year, 2009, with a 49.9 percent approval rating and a 44.6 disapproval rating.
