A new poll conducted shortly before the end of outgoing US President Barack Obama’s tenure shows that more than half of the registered voters nationwide approve of his performance in the Oval Office. According to the McClatchy-Marist opinion poll released on Tuesday, 55 percent of the voters were satisfied with Obama’s job performance during his two terms, while 42 percent disapproved of it and 3 percent were uncertain. The survey shows Obama’s highest approval rating in the poll since August 2009, when he also received 55 percent. “For all the partisanship and bitter battles during the last eight years, President Obama is receiving strong send-off numbers,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

The Tuesday poll registers a four-percent rise in the outgoing president’s approval rating in comparison with last month,when 51 percent of the voters expressed approval, 44 percent disapproval and 4 percent uncertainty. Carried out via cellphones and landlines in the first nine days of December, the survey has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points. This comes as on November 8, Republican nominee Donald Trump stunned the political world and won the US presidency despite extreme unpopularity among minorities with 306 votes in the Electoral College, 36 more than he required to win the White House.

His Democratic rival, however, won the national popular vote by more than two million ballots in the November election. Large protests have erupted nationwide in response to Trump’s election victory following a contentious presidential campaign involving two of the least popular major-party candidates in recent US history. Clinton has come under fire for using a private email account and server at her home in New York for official emails when she was America’s top diplomat between 2009 and 2013 and Trump’s campaign has been replete with disparaging remarks and belligerent rhetoric against Muslims and minorities in the US. The US future president is set to assume office on January 20th, 2017.

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