Years later, Obama enjoys a level of public support that Trump can only dream of

About a year ago, a national YouGov poll found that Barack Obama was “by far” the nation’s most well-liked political figure. A national CNN poll released last week pointed in a similar direction. From the network’s report:

Obama is viewed positively by 57% of Americans, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, far surpassing the ratings for his two Oval Office successors. Only 34% of the public offers a favorable opinion of President Donald Trump, with former President Joe Biden’s favorability trailing at just 30%.

Obama’s standing among political independents is more than twice as high as either Biden’s or Trump’s.

(The poll was conducted before the recent coverage of the opening of the Obama Center in Chicago, which offered the former president a hearty dose of positive coverage.)

While only about one-fifth of Republican voters say they have a positive view of Obama, that’s actually relatively high by contemporary standards: Other living presidents have far less support from voters of the opposing party.

The same survey asked an open-ended question about which president — alive or dead — Americans most admired. Obama again crushed the competition, leading the pack with 30%.

A couple of years ago, the latest edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey asked a group of scholars to rank every American president, and Obama fared quite well, finishing seventh, trailing only Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman.

At the time, the results got me thinking about whether the public’s perceptions were more or less in line with presidential scholars’ judgment. Evidently, the answer is yes.

As for Trump — who, incidentally, finished dead last in the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey — the Republican incumbent didn’t comment on the CNN poll, though it stands to reason that he found it disappointing, not just because of his poor showing, but because it suggests his yearslong smear campaign against Obama has failed spectacularly.

As recently as last week, Trump participated in the G7 summit in France and continued to fixate on his Democratic predecessor, falsely declaring on the world stage that Iranians considered Obama “a stupid son of a b—-.” (In reality, Obama negotiated a far better deal with Iran, and he succeeded without having to start a deadly and destabilizing war.)

The New York Times reported soon after, “The focus on Mr. Obama on Wednesday underscored Mr. Trump’s obsession with persuading people he is a superior leader to the former president. Over the course of the 3-day summit, Mr. Trump — who has had a fixation with the nation’s first Black president for more than a decade, starting with pushing a racist lie that he was not American — mentioned Mr. Obama by name nearly two dozen times.”

The more the Republican incumbent tries to convince people to prefer him to Obama, the more we’re confronted with evidence that most Americans still have far more favorable views of the former president than of Trump.

The post Years later, Obama enjoys a level of public support that Trump can only dream of appeared first on MS NOW.