You might want to take a look at election analyst David Byler’s breakdown of possibilities about Trump’s approval rating at RealClearPolitics:
For the last few months, the Trump presidency has presented analysts with a weird puzzle. The news has been chaotic — Congress has made multiple attempts to pass new health care legislation, stories tied to Russian interference in the election seem to come out daily, various key White House roles have been vacated and filled and the president has made multiple foreign trips. Yet despite this roller coaster of events, his poll numbers have been shockingly stable. Specifically, Trump’s job approval has hovered around the 40 percent mark for over two months, almost never deviating by more than one percentage point.
So why are these numbers so stable when events are anything but? The world of political data has been busy debating this topic, so rather than simply lay out one view and argue for it, I’m going to describe five different views that have popped up. (Note: Some of these ideas were generated simultaneously by multiple people, adopted and edited by others and generally have changed in ways that make them difficult to trace back to one author.) I’ll also explore what each view might predict about the future. In the coming months we’ll be able to check what happened against each theory’s predictions and get a better sense of which one, if any, was right.
Although I’d put the specific numbers for Trump’s approval floor and ceiling differently than Mr. Byler does, his Theory #1 approximates what I’ve mentioned around here a couple of time and I continue to believe that’s the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. He has a floor of around 35% and a ceiling of around 50% and that’s that Not enough to get him booted out of office but a lot worse than presidents of recent memory.
Read the whole thing.
Hat tip: Steve Green. He’s a St. Louisan, BTW. When I first spoke with him I used the secret St. Louis countersign and he responded properly which told me quite a bit about him.
If its St. Louis, that means you asked him what high school he attended, and he asked the same.
I think this mostly represents a big chunk of people who hate the left so will support anything Trump does. It also is a byproduct of the decades long campaign against all media that is not obviously conservative. If the NYT quotes Trump, it can’t be correct because it is the NYT reporting it. Numbers no longer matter, just feelings.
Steve
First of all, I think there are an awful lot of people who don’t pay great attention to minutia of politics and public affairs. And from their viewpoints, the parties are much the same and the yammering between conservatives and liberals is just the same old noise.
Obamacare obamacare Trumpcare trumpcare — who cares? Hillary shillery emails, Donny and the Russkies, big deal. Executive orders and people going in and out of office in the White House and hokey deals in Congress? Happened with Obama, happens now, who cares?
TL,DR: Trump’s critics are convincing themselves that he’s running a uniquely awful Presidency, accompanied by a Congress that increasingly resembles the legislature of a disintegrating third-world nation. Everyone else thinks the situation is normal.
This doesn’t point to coming political change.