President Donald Trump’s approval rating climbed throughout the month of February to match levels seen by former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton at similar points in office.
Trump’s approval rating stood at approximately 42.2 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted average and ticked up to 46 percent in the latest NBCNews/Wall Street Journal poll, with a nearly 3-percent margin of error.
The figures align with the approximately 47-percent approval rating seen by Obama on the same day in office and the 44-percent approval rating seen by Clinton. Both Obama and Clinton won re-election to office.
The same poll found that 41 percent of respondents would vote to re-elect Trump to office in 2020. The research was conducted while a slew of Democratic candidates announced they would seek to unseat the president from office setting in motion the year-long sprint to the first primaries of the 2020 election cycle.
The Trump administration has sought to display the 2020 presidential election as a referendum on socialist policies. (RELATED: Pence Frames 2020 As Referendum On Socialism)
Vice President Mike Pence laid this strategy out explicitly at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) last week, saying, “The truth is, we want people to make poor people richer, they want to make rich people poorer. We want to make poverty [rarer]; they want to make poverty more comfortable. That’s the choice we face today: between freedom and socialism, between personal responsibility and government dependence.”
Trump also ridiculed newer Democratic proposals like the Green New Deal at CPAC, sarcastically mimicking a person asking if the wind is blowing so he can watch TV.
While speaking a CPAC, President Trump mocked the Democrats’ Green New Deal idea to combat climate change. https://t.co/dLcYBSRFRI pic.twitter.com/gJ4GP1cSFw
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) March 2, 2019
Rasmussen polling also Trump rising from 43-percent approval at the beginning of the February and rose to 49 percent on Feb 28. The Rasmussen daily tracking poll found Trump hitting a high of 52 percent on Feb 11. The same poll found Obama at the same 49-percent approval rating on Feb 28, 2011.
Here are #Trump‘s daily job approval numbers for today… https://t.co/mazBCWoIMy @POTUS @realDonaldTrump #BreakingPoll pic.twitter.com/eJGZe1p4nw
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) March 4, 2019
February was a hard-fought political month for the president with a high-stakes fight over border wall funding with Congress, his delayed State of the Union address and was capped by his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.