CNN:
President Barack Obama's approval rating is shifting back toward positive territory, as the public's take on the economy hits a new high mark for Obama's tenure, according to a new CNN/ORC poll.
For the first time since May of 2013, more Americans polled say they have a positive impression of how Obama is handling the presidency than a negative one: 48% approve of the way Obama is handling his job, while 47% disapprove.
While the share saying they approve is not significantly larger than the share disapproving, it's a notable shift in perceptions of Obama's presidency.
Obama's numbers are on the rise at the same time the public gives the economy the highest ratings of his presidency.
The poll finds 52% describe the U.S. economy as very or somewhat good, while 48% call it very or somewhat poor. That marks the first time since Obama took office that significantly more people describe the economy as "good" than "poor," and only the second time since then that a majority has described the nation's economy as "good.
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.
Basically, expecting older Republicans to support Ocare is like waiting for them to vote to raise local taxes to fund schools. Ain't gonna happen, so just go ahead and do it anyway.
More politics and policy below the fold.
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.
HuffPost Pollster:
Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) probably isn't having the 2015 he hoped he would. A poll released Monday finds that Christie's job approval rating has fallen to a record low among New Jersey voters.
According to the Quinnipiac poll, only 38 percent of New Jersey voters approve of the job Christie is doing as governor. This represents an 8-point drop from January, as measured in an earlier Quinnipiac poll. A majority of voters expressed disapproval of Christie's handling of education, the economy and the state budget.
Christie's approval score on this new survey is the lowest he has received on the Quinnipiac poll while he's been in office, and the lowest approval rating for any governor in the nine states Quinnipiac has surveyed this year.
Ed Kilgore:
False Analogy Alert: No, Every Bad Candidate Isn’t McCain ‘08
At the risk of beating a really dead horse, I’d add that McCain had a few things going for him in 2008 that either might not happen in 2016 or might benefit someone other than Chris Christie. By the time voters started voting the early frontrunner, Rudy Giuliani, was already losing steam fast. Mitt Romney was thrown off track in Iowa by Mike Huckabee, who did not himself have any traction in (or money to spend for) New Hampshire. After New Hampshire McCain was able to thread the needle and achieve plurality wins in South Carolina and Florida over a weakened Romney and a last-gasp Huckabee campaign (itself bumped out of a SC win by a last-gasp Fred Thompson campaign), and then roll on to victory. And again, this was a guy who remained relatively popular the whole way. It takes some real magical thinking to envision Chris Christie in that role—and probably anybody else.
Nate Cohn:
A conservative candidate who hopes to win Iowa, like Mr. Cruz or Scott Walker, needs a substantial chunk of the evangelical vote. If Mr. Huckabee enters the race, he could pose a big roadblock to both. Even if he doesn’t win, he will make it easier for a relatively secular conservative candidate to win than has been the case in recent contests. And if Mr. Huckabee does win — as he very plausibly could over a strong, divided field — he will deny a more viable conservative candidate the easiest opportunity to consolidate the conservative opposition to Jeb Bush, or whoever wins New Hampshire.
And Mr. Huckabee, to be clear, is not an especially viable national candidate. He won virtually no support among non-evangelical voters in 2008, posting single-digit tallies among such voters in crucial states like Illinois and Florida. He did better among non-evangelicals later, but only after he was the only candidate remaining to challenge John McCain.