At Bloomberg Jonathan Bernstein muses over why President Trump’s approval rating hasn’t collapsed following all of the bad news and the House Democrats’ “impeachment inquiry”:
Three weeks into the Ukraine scandal, there’s been basically no movement in President Donald Trump’s approval rating. He’s at 42.2%, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling tracker, down just a bit from where he was on Sept. 24. The big change, which I looked at last week, is that the group of voters who oppose Trump and also oppose impeachment has emptied out. Now turn to the question of why his approval rating has stayed stable so far.
He comes up with three prospective explanations:
- The news sources for those who support Trump and those who oppose him are completely distinct. Trump supporters haven’t been hearing bad news.
- Trump supporters now equate opposition with impeachment and they don’t support impeachment.
- The numbers are just locked in. Not many people are changing their opinions.
Add to that two more. First, as I’ve suggested, Trump supporters, while fully cognizant of the bad news, just don’t see what all of the hooplah is about. It’s just Trump being Trump. Another possibility is that the Democratic presidential candidates are so discouraging that to a lot of people Trump still looks good by comparison.
Regardless of the reason, so far this situation is very different from that which confronted Nixon. Nixon’s very high support practically collapsed overnight. Trump’s comparatively low support is remaining pretty much where it has been for the last six months to a year.
It’s more like the situation that Bill Clinton saw—the domestic economic situation was good enough that people weren’t discouraged by the president’s misbehavior and they didn’t think it rose to the level of impeachment. Maybe something will change. Or maybe it will unfold much as the Clinton impeachment did.
From the Saturday Night Massacre until support for impeachment topped 50% was almost 9 months. From the time the House gave the judiciary committee subpoena powers until it topped 50% was almost 6 months.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/it-took-a-long-time-for-republicans-to-abandon-nixon/
On some variation of number 3 and your number one I think Trump supporters are happy with tax cuts and judges so they pretty much dont care what he does. If Hillary or Obama had done this they would be raising heck. (Another recent reminder of this is the GOP apathy about the Trump WH using private messaging services for official business. No chants of lock em up.)
Steve
Steve is right. The only approval poll that matters is twelve and half months away.
A key point is keeping his current support isn’t enough for Trump, he has to increase it by 2-4 points.
If impeachment hardens everyone’s positions, that may make a hard job impossible.