Republicans Are Making Obama Popular Again

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This isn’t exactly Oprah levels of adulation or anything, but President Obama’s Gallup approval ratings have been rising steadily ever since Republicans won the midterm elections last year. He’s been bouncing around positive territory ever since the start of 2015, and today he clocks in at 48-47 percent approval.

Is this because the economy is picking up and people are just generally happier? Is it because his executive actions have made a favorable impression on the public? Is it because Republican incompetence makes him look good by comparison? Hard to say, but it certainly suggests that Democrats are pretty happy with him. As Ed Kilgore says:

Among Democrats, who are supposedly on the brink of a “struggle for the soul of the party,” and ideologically riven between Elizabeth Warren “populists” and Obama/Clinton “centrists,” Obama’s approval rating stands at 81%. And looking deeper, he’s at 86% among self-identified “liberal Democrats,” 78% among “moderate Democrats,” and yes, 67% among “conservative Democrats,” such as they are….This is another example of isolated data being somewhat limited in value, but worth a couple of dozen Politico columns.

Yep. And I’ll bet that once things get going, Hillary Clinton will poll about the same way.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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