Wednesday Open Thread [4.22.15]

A new CNN/ORC poll finds President Obama’s approval ratings have reached their highest mark in almost two years.

“48% of Americans approve of how Obama is running the country, compared to 47% who disapprove. That’s the highest mark since May 2013, the last time a plurality of Americans backed the president in the poll. [Fifty-two percent] believe the economy is either ‘very good’ or ‘somewhat good.’”

CNN compared the President’s standing to his immediate two term predecessors, Presidents Bush, Clinton and Reagan.

Obama now is as popular as Ronald Reagan was at the same point in their second terms. The President’s approval rating has increased with 18-29-year-olds (57%), women (51%), Democrats (88%), and liberal Democrats (97%).

This is devastating news for the Republicans, who have based their entire existence, yet alone their 2016 campaign strategy, on the fevered alternate reality notion that Obama is this despised weaking mealy mouthed tyrannical dictator, who is both a radical black Christian but also a Muslim socialist communist.

Republicans have been arguing that a win for Hillary Clinton in 2016 would equal an Obama third term. The question Republicans forgot to ask: what if America wants an Obama third term?

Max Blumenthal and Greg Sargent take note of the fact that Obamacare is now popular. Someone please the bars to see if the Republicans are already drinking early. Mark Blumenthal:

Favorable impressions of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act have increased slightly in recent months, showing the highest positive rating in a key tracking poll since the autumn of 2012.

While the change is small, the reasons behind it hint at shifts in the political environment that may foreshadow better news for the ACA in the months and years to come.

The latest monthly survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds 43 percent of Americans reporting a favorable opinion on the “health reform bill signed into law in 2010.” Forty-two percent reported having an unfavorable opinion, and 14 percent said they were unsure.

While some headlines emphasized the nominally net positive rating, “the [1-point] difference is within the survey’s margin of sampling error and is not statistically significant,” according to Kaiser’s report.

Far more important is the trend that shows views of the ACA narrowing to what the Kaiser analysts described as “the closest margin in over two years.” Where negative views exceeded positive views by an average of 10 percentage points in KFF tracking during 2014 (47 to 37), the two categories have essentially drawn even over the past several months. This change represents a gain of roughly 5 percentage points in favorable opinions about the health care law as compared to those measured by the Kaiser Foundation surveys, on average, during 2014.

Greg Sargent:

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the Kaiser poll demonstrates that GOP priorities for the future of the law are very different from those of Americans overall and independents.
The poll finds that 74 percent of Republicans want the law repealed or scaled back. By contrast, 46 percent of Americans overall want to move forward with implementation of it or expand it, versus 41 percent who want it scaled back or repealed. Independents are evenly split.

The poll also finds that one of the top priorities for Republican voters is repeal of the individual mandate. 52 percent of Republicans view this as a top priority; only 37 percent of Americans, and the same percentage of independents, agree.

Republicans are out of step with the American people? That is shocking news. /sarcasm.

FLORIDA–SENATOR–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY–Mason-Dixon: Rep. Patrick Murphy (D) 23, Rep. Alan Grayson (D) 14, with 63% are undecided.

FLORIDA–SENATOR–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY–Mason-Dixon: Bill McCollum (R) 20, Rep. David Jolly (R) 8, Vern Buchanan (R) 7 and Tom Rooney (R) 5, with 48% undecided.