In order to really know President Obama's approval rating, it is important to use sources that provide unbiased poll numbers. For this, there is the Pew Research Center.
According to Pew Research, Obama's highest ever approval rating was 64% way back in February 2009. Fast forward 4 years, and it declined to 52% in January of 2013.
However, this is only for his first term; ratings can change drastically in a year.
Another Pew Research poll that was completed July 14 of this year places President Obama's approval rating at 44%. This is only 3 percentage points higher than his all-time low.
It is important to note, though, that there was not a completely even number of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents surveyed in this poll. In fact, there were more Independents and Democrats than Republicans. It is also worth noting that the pollsters were able to somewhat accurately represent each race. 62.6% of all American citizens are White alone, and the poll had about 70.2% White respondents, which is close. The same is true for the Black and Hispanic poll respondents. 9.3% of respondents were Black, close to the national average of 13.2%, and 12.3% were Hispanic. This is also fairly close to the the national average for Hispanics (17.1%).
Howbeit, the poll was still weighed to balance out the results, which has the potential mess up the numbers. What is interesting, though, is that Pew Research does not provide much information on how the weighting was calculated. Without this information, it is difficult to tell if the final poll results are at all an accurate representation of the American population.
Sadly, almost every reputable poll uses statistical weighing to correct issues, which means that most polls have a probability of error beyond that of a lack of using the total population of the United States.
Therefore, it is impossible to determine President Obama's true, unweighted, approval rating. However, polls such as these from the Pew Research Center can give a good ballpark estimate.
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