As he prepares to pitch an expansive new package of gun restrictions to a bitterly divided Congress, Barack Obama has the majority of voters on his side. A new TIME/CNN/ORC poll that will be released Wednesday afternoon finds that 55% of Americans approve of the job Obama is doing as President, compared to 43% who disapprove.
That ratio mirrors the public appetite for tighter restrictions on guns, with 55% of respondents favoring stricter gun control laws and 44% opposed.
Obama’s approval rating, mired in the 40s for much of his first term, has improved in the wake of his re-election and an acrimonious fight over the fiscal cliff, jumping three percentage points from the 52% he registered in a December CNN/ORC poll. The new poll also shows that Vice President Joe Biden’s approval rating has spiked to 59%, up from 54% in December, amid high-profile turns negotiating the fiscal cliff deal and spearheading Obama’s firearms task force.
Full results of the new TIME/CNN/ORC poll, which surveyed 814 adult Americans on Jan. 14-15 and has a sampling error of 3.5 percentage points, will be available on Time.com and CNN.com at 4 p.m. EST.