The favorability rating of Arizona Sen. John McCain has surged to 58 percent after he cast the decisive vote that prevented the GOP's bill on repealing Obamacare from passing, according to a Gallup poll released Monday.
This marks an increase in his favorability rating by 5 percentage points – buoyed by Democrats – from the last time it was measured two years ago.
The poll was conducted shortly after the Republican senator returned to the Senate from his home in Arizona to cast the fateful vote after undergoing emergency surgery and the discovery that he had an aggressive form of brain cancer.
Other results from the poll include:
- McCain's increase in his favorable rating comes despite a 10-percentage point decline in his rating among Republicans to 51 percent.
- That dropoff, however was more than made up for by Democrats, who registered a 71 percent favorable rating. This represented a 22-point increase since the last survey two years ago.
This places McCain in a very unusual situation, where a politician receives better ratings from backers of the other party than from his own. Gallup said that the only other time this happened was when then Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut had higher ratings among Republicans than Democrats in two 2006 polls.
That occurred due to Lieberman's consistent support for the Iraq War, which put him at odds with the views of most elected Democrats, while his pro-war positions influenced Republicans to view him positively.
- McCain's favorability rating is his highest since he had 64 percent in November 2008, shortly after he lost the presidential election to Barack Obama.
- McCain's ratings were the most politically polarized of his career after he won the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. At that time he had a 71-point party difference in the final pre-election poll, when 93 percent of Republicans and 22 percent of Democrats had a favorable opinion of him.
In addition to McCain's decision to vote against the Obamacare repeal effort, his ongoing battles with Trump also appear to be a magnet for attracting Democratic supporters.
Results were based on telephone interviews conducted Aug. 2-6, with a random sample of 1,017 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.