| | | OOPS! Trump Should Worry About His Approval Rating; Nothing seems to sway the public’s bad opinion of the president. That doesn’t bode well for 2020.
By Jonathan Bernstein
May 22, 2019, 3:38 AM MST
bloomberg.com
The last time I looked carefully at President Donald Trump’s approval ratings, he had failed to gain any ground after Attorney General William Barr issued his (implausibly positive) summary of the special counsel’s report.Since then, the full (redacted) report has been released; Barr’s Senate testimony received quite a bit of coverage; Trump’s trade war with China dominated the news for a while; solid jobs and GDP numbers were published; and Trump decided to stonewall House investigators, who are now using the courts to push back. After all that, his approval ratings are … pretty much where they’ve always been. Trump remains, overall, by far the least popular president in the polling era.Technically, over the past two months, Trump’s approval has dipped, rebounded and dipped again. Through May 21, he was down to 41.2% approval and 54.0% disapproval. That’s a little worse than it was before Robert Mueller’s investigation ended. But it’s likely that random variation in survey results are producing small ups and downs. My guess is that Trump has been at around 42% approval and 53% disapproval ever since the government shutdown ended in January. More broadly, Trump seems to have lost half a percentage point in approval since 2018. For a normal president, a change that tiny wouldn’t be worth mentioning. For Trump, who has had incredibly stable numbers, anything that bumps him down even a little seems (and maybe is) more important.Trump’s current approval rating is the second-lowest of any polling-era president through 852 days in office, beating out only Jimmy Carter. He has the worst disapproval at this point of any of those presidents, and is second to last in net approval (the difference between approval and disapproval). Compared to the last four presidents who were reelected, Trump is solidly behind. His net approval, at -12.8%, is about 14 points worse than Ronald Reagan’s, 20 points worse than Barack Obama’s and 25 points worse than Bill Clinton’s. He trails George W. Bush by 45 points.As always, I’ll point out that there’s plenty of time for change. In the 18 months before they were up for re-election, most of the polling-era presidents had swings of at least 10 percentage points, up or down (or in many cases both).That said, it’s still true that there’s never been a president, at least from Harry Truman on, as consistently unpopular as Donald Trump. It remains hard to see where he would find new support, and it’s possible that he has at least a soft ceiling at around 45% approval. If that’s true, it’s going to take either an amazing fluke for him to win a second term or a lot of people voting for him while thinking he’s doing a bad job. And people usually don’t vote for a president while thinking he’s doing a bad job.1. Kathryn Dunn Tenpas on cabinet turnover in the last few administrations – and who counts as a cabinet member, anyway?2. Molly Reynolds and Margaret Taylor explain what a formal impeachment inquiry would mean. Very helpful.3. Becca Wasser and Ariane Tabatabai at the Monkey Cage on Iran’s non-state partners. |
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