First, go over and look at the RealClearPolitics average of polls on Donald Trump’s approval rating. It’s stable at 40%.
It’s not worsening, it’s not improving. It’s stable at 40%. His floor of approval seems to be at about 38%.
Much of that approval is probably among Republicans. Indeed, if Gallup is to be believed his approval rating among Republicans is 85%. Do the math.
He’s not going to be impeached. The Republicans are likely to hold the House through the midterm elections. What we will probably see for the next three years is three years of depressing sameness. Where is there a basis for agreement with this dichotomy of views?
Much like RealClearPolitics, Pollster also tracks the President’s job approval numbers, and its interface allows one to filter the data that goes into the calculation of the average of ways, including by party identification.
Doing so yields interesting pieces of data:
1. The Pollster average overall is about the same as the RCP average and generally shows the same thing the RCP average does, namely a floor of around 38% since Inauguration Day.
2. Among Democrats, the President is, not surprisingly, wildly unpopular;
3. Among Republicans, the average is about the same as what that Gallup poll shows; and,
4. Among Independents, the average is somewhat worse for Trump than it is in the cumulative average.
I tend to agree with you that Republicans on Capitol Hill are unlikely to break with Trump as long as his support among Republicans remains high, which it likely will for the foreseeable future. At the same time, though, they ought to keep an eye on that number for Independents if they’re at all concerned about the midterms.
Fact is, progressives have more in common with Trump than they do with Pence or that Paul creature. I can never remember his last name. Trump was a Democrat for many years and has some generous impulses, even if he does have self-serving economic goals.
In this climate, though, nothing will come of that and progressives will lose.
Doug:
I don’t just look at support levels. I look at trends and the trend is that there is no trend. Trump’s support is level. That tells me that as long as the Republicans hold the House Trump has nothing to worry about.
The Democrats’ approach to wooing those who didn’t vote for them the last time around tells me that the Republicans will hold the House until at least 2020.
So much of this Presidency has been unprecedented that I would be wary of assuming that he has a stable floor. When people realize that they’ve been lied to, they can turn from ardent supporters to ardent haters in a heartbeat.
The question is whether people will admit to themselves that they have been lied to.
As a hypothetical, let’s assume the President’s son, let’s just call this hypothetical son Fredo, were to tweet out evidence of collusion with the Russians. It’s an absurd, ridiculous idea, of course, but let’s go with it. You might have been saying that the whole Russia thing was made up news, and now you have to shift to “but everyone does it, it’s only mild treason”. It’s a big shift.
The intellectual leaps that one must perform to continue to believe that nothing untoward happened become harder and harder, day by day, and there’s got to be some limit to that. There’s a breaking point, and the first family is intent on finding it.
Events, dear boy, events.
At this point in their Presidency’s, 9/11 and Iraq were still in the future for W, the Congressional Recess that foreshadowed the Tea Party wave was yet to come for Obama, the Deficit reduction act or the collapse of the HillaryCare was still in the future for Clinton.
Today is very different from 1993 or 2001 or even 2009. The battle lines are drawn and the number of people who are persuadable is really relatively small. Certainly less than 25% of the population. Maybe as low as 15%.
It’s not politics. It’s marketing. In marketing you divide the entire marketing universe into the sellable and the unsellable. If 85% of voters are unsellable (for or against), don’t expect much to change.
At this point it doesn’t matter what actually happens. Everyone has their own facts.
For every nine Gustophers who are absolutely convinced that it’s inevitable that the scales will fall from some of the Trump supporters’ eyes and he will lose support catastrophically there are seven Trump supporters for whom that will just never happen. For those 16 there are one or two persuadables.
It’s a kind of mania. The sides are talking past one another.
Dave,
I agree that the trend is important. In that regard, though, it’s worth noting that we’re not even 180 days into the Trump Presidency and we’re at the point where Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any President since World War II. Historically, it’s been the case that this early period is typically the high point for most new Presidents and that things are only likely to get worse from here. How long that takes is what can’t be foreseen.
President Obama was in office nearly two years before his average disapproval numbers began to trend above his approval number and, even then, the gap between the was relatively small even leading up to the 2010 elections when the GOP recaptured the House.
For President Bush, it took almost four years for him to reach that point, but that was in no small part due to the heights that he reached in the immediate wake of the September 11th attacks. That “September 11th” effect kept his approval average above his disapproval average until just around the time he and John Kerry faced off in the 2004 election.
Most other Presidents going all the way back to Eisenhower starting in 1953 followed the same pattern that Obama did with their numbers looking fairly good for at least two years or longer depending on factors such as the economy and other outside events.
If this first year period is Trump’s “peak” for his first term, then things could get quite difficult for the GOP by the time the midterms roll around, and thereafter. Also, needless to say, 40% support in the polls wouldn’t be a good number in 2020.
Edit:
That first paragraph should read “the lowest approval rating of any *new* President since World War II.”
I hit Submit before i noticed the rather important omission.
And yet Trump has been able to withstand the most concerted avalanche of negative press of any incoming president without the needle moving a bit.
I stand by the comparison I’ve made to the old wisecrack about mud rasslin’ with a pig. You get dirty and the pig likes it. That’s what’s happened to the NYT and WP so far. If it keeps on this way much longer, neither outlet will survive in its present form.
Jumping to conclusions like this after only 172 days seems like to be a bit of a stretch to me, to be honest.
Yes, things do move quickly in today’s media environment, but if we know one thing from history it is that nothing lasts forever.
I wish I had a dollar for every claim that Trump would be gone in six months, that the American system was rejecting him as the body does a disease, etc. There are just no signs of it at this point.
For something to change the major news outlets will need to offer something stronger than unfounded allegations and unnamed sources.
Keep in mind that I’m no Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for him, I don’t like it that he’s president. But I see what I see, unclouded by wishful thinking.
I wish I had a dollar for every claim that Trump would be gone in six months, that the American system was rejecting him as the body does a disease, etc. There are just no signs of it at this point.
Some people are making exactly the same mistakes they made in 2016, assuming the future is a replay of the past. It’s an exceedingly arrogant position and it blinds those people to the truth that the future is uncertain, not deterministic.
Also, control of the House for the next decade will be decided in 2018 and I see no evidence whatsoever the Democrats have plans to contest at the state level.
There’s a significant range of possibilities between deterministic on the one hand and completely unpredictable on the other. I think that choosing among the most likely alternatives is usually a pretty good bet.
So, for example, last November speculating that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be elected president was reasonable but that Jeremy Corbyn would be wasn’t.
That’s pretty much the way I see it. That the Democrats continue to believe that demographics will inevitably secure them a permanent majority makes me wish that more of the Congressional Democrats had taken statistics classes in college and fewer political science classes. Heck, they would have been better off taking Renaissance poetry classes than poli sci classes.
Well, what was the probability that Donald Trump would be assassinated before the election? How do we model the likelihood of Wikileaks releasing something so damning it cost Clinton the election? Certainly some things are more or less uncertain than others; waking up tomorrow is of less uncertainty than whether North Korea will use a nuclear weapon.
If you haven’t read Shattered yet, I strongly recommend it. The narrative of Bill Clinton’s belief in politics vs. Robby Mook’s focus on data is a fascinating one.
Nothing lasts forever is one of things that is true but carries no information. I’m more persuaded by the observation that the reality is that despite a never ending political and media onslaught, the polling positions hold firm.
I would suggest that said onslaught has inured Republicans, if not angered them into rigity. One can understand foaming at the mouth partisans. Perhaps one can understand politicians playing without the gloves on. But the press has gone so beyond its supposed function and responsibilities that it has angered Trump supporting and many relatively neutral Republicans. Trump doesn’t attack the media because it’s bad politics.
Now on the other hand, it could be that supporters are tired of the backward looking, no agenda Democrats who apparently have nothing better to do than noodle over the Russians and Hillary’s loss, and would like to see something useful get done. Well, maybe…….
Foaming at the mouth partisans? Democrats do exactly what the GOP did with Benghazi, and they are foaming at the mouth. Sure! (Snicker)
Trump attacks the media because it is great politics in the GOP. Did it from day one, back when he was getting great free coverage.
Steve
Most of those claims and predictions seem to me to be coming mostly from partisans and people who clearly don’t follow politics closely. I’ve been saying from the start that the odds of Trump being forced out are fairly slim, and that it’s likely that the GOP will be holding on to at least the House of Representatives through 2020.
None of that means, though, that these job approval numbers aren’t important, or that they won’t have an impact on the Administration’s ability to advance its agenda. Additionally, as several others have noted, the probability is high that Trump will likely face at least one crisis moment during the coming three years, most likely a foreign policy related one. The fact that most Americans disapprove of the job he’s doing could have a real impact on his ability to convince the nation of the proper course of action in advance of this public, not that he’s given any indication of caring about public opinion, which is part of his problem right now.
Perhaps he’ll handle this crisis well and his job approval numbers will improve. We’ll see about that. Personally, I have absolutely no confidence in his judgment in these matters and find myself hoping more than I might have with regard to previous Presidents that he listens to the right people (in this case people like Mattis and McMaster and to a lesser extent Tillerson) rather than the rank amateurs (Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka) that make up his inner circle on the White House Staff.
On the broader point, though, you’re right. Trump isn’t going anywhere. He’s not going to resign, he’s not going to be impeached (indeed, no House has ever impeached a President of their own party in American history), and he will still be President until at least Noon on January 20, 2021.