Even though President Barack Obama's approval rating is slowly increasing, he's still one of the most polarizing presidents in over 50 years, a new Gallup poll reveals.
During the president's sixth year in office, an average of 79 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing while an average of only 9 percent of Republicans approved.
"That 70-percentage-point party gap in approval ratings ties for the fifth-most-polarized year for a president in Gallup records dating back to 1953," Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones wrote.
In fact, each of Obama's six years as president rank among the 10 most polarized years in last 60 years, with George W. Bush holding the four other spots. Obama's most polarized year was his fourth, when Democratic approval was at 86 percent and Republican approval at 10 percent.
If Obama's polarization trend continues, he stands to become the most polarizing president to date, noted Gallup.
Obama's overall approval rating has risen though, according to a separate Gallup analysis, from 40 percent in August 2014 to 45 percent in February, largely attributable to an improving economy and finished midterm political battles.
"Both Bush and Obama were elected with hopes of unifying the country. However, the opposite has happened, at least in the way Americans view the job the president is doing, with presidential evaluations more divided along party lines than ever before," Jones wrote.
"These increasingly partisan views of presidents may have as much to do with the environment in which these presidents have governed as with their policies, given 24-hour news coverage of what they do and increasingly partisan news and opinion sources on television, in print and online."
