President Trump’s approval rating reached new heights in the second half of April, according to the Gallup poll, as nearly half of voters gave him positive marks.
Trump’s approval rating ticked up to 46 percent, up slightly from 45 percent in the first part of April and the highest mark to date for Trump in the Gallup poll.
{mosads}It comes on the heels of strong economic numbers and the largely favorable outcome of the Russia investigation.
Trump remains overwhelmingly popular among Republicans, 91 percent of whom gave the president positive marks in the latest Gallup poll. That figure falls just short of the record high of 92 percent approval among GOP respondents, reached in a Gallup survey in November.
Among Democrats, 12 percent said they approve of Trump’s job performance, according to the poll. That figure matches the previous high among Democrats recorded in April 2017.
Trump’s approval among independents dipped slightly from 39 percent in the first half of April to 37 percent in the latest poll.
The Gallup poll surveyed 1,024 adults nationwide from April 17 to April 30. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Trump has largely been buoyed by a strong economy that saw continued growth in April.
U.S. gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of 2019, exceeding expectations. The Gallup survey was completed before last week’s jobs report came out.
The timing of the poll also overlapped with the immediate aftermath of the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Trump hailed its findings as a “total exoneration” after Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Mueller neither implicated nor exonerated Trump on obstruction of justice but detailed 10 episodes investigators reviewed for the charge.
Attorney General William Barr said he and outgoing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did not find there was sufficient evidence to charge the president.
Polling concluded, however, prior to new revelations last week that Mueller wrote to Barr in March to criticize the attorney general’s four-page summary of the full report. Mueller wrote that Barr’s memo “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of the special counsel’s report and that it caused “public confusion about critical aspects” of the results of the investigation.
Barr endured a grilling from Senate Democrats last week in which they accused him of mishandling Mueller’s report and allowing the president to declare victory. A number of Democrats have called on Barr to resign.