The end of President Obama’s 2014 is going far better than the rest of his year, with 48 percent of Americans approving of his job performance.
The latest Gallup daily tracking poll released Tuesday found that 48 percent of respondents approve and 48 percent disapprove of the job Obama is doing.
For most of his second term, Obama has hovered around a 40 percent approval rating, with more Americans saying they disapproved of his job performance.
Obama appears to have benefited from a series of executive actions he took in the lame-duck session of Congress, including the deferral of deportations for up to 5 million illegal immigrants and the normalizing of relations with Cuba.
Americans are also beginning to show more confidence in the state of the economy, likely bolstering perceptions of Obama.
The president has seen a similar uptick in a handful of polls in recent days.
The daily Gallup figures are hardly static, but they give Democrats a glimmer of good news as they brace for a Republican takeover of Congress in 2015.
When Democrats were soundly defeated by Republicans in the November midterms, Obama’s approval ratings were much lower, which heavily contributed to the poor showing by progressive candidates in an off-year election.
Though Obama has received at least a short-term bump, Republicans are vowing to fight his executive action on immigration and roll back other major items enacted since the president took office.
The Gallup daily poll is a telephone survey of roughly 1,500 adults, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
