The Official Trump 1.0 Approval Ratings Thread

[Person Man]

I'm not sure it makes sense to look at historical averages covering both parties when trying to predict midterm losses in the House.  At the moment, at least, there's a pretty significant asymmetry between the two parties in terms of how efficiently their voters are distributed geographically, such that the Dems would need a rather substantial margin of victory in the national House popular vote in order to win back the chamber.  Trump might be unpopular, but unless the people who don't like him are geographically distributed in an optimal way, it won't matter.

Whether President Trump will be unpopular in the late summer and early autumn of 2018 is yet to be known. But if he should be unpopular enough, Democrats will have  enough of an edge in the national popular vote for the House that they can swing as many as 42 House seats by winning districts that are up to R+5... enough for an unambiguous majority. That would take about a 55-45 split in the vote.  But if enough people want to constrain him, that is what they will have to do.

2006 Dems won the national popular vote by around 8%, so that's totally doable.

Also... odd finding... the GOP won the House of Reps popular vote in 2016 by a 1% margin... Dems gained 6 seats... so, the Dems are really only facing a national PVI penalty of around 2%. A 6% Dem margin would be enough to win the House if that is applied broadly.

Wait, I'm sorry, you'll have to explain that logic to me.  Why would a 6% Dem. margin be enough to win the House?  I don't follow.

I was a bit inarticulate, but you actually prove my point above. You said Mia Love won with a 12.5% margin, when the Dems are down 1% nationally... well, if you increase the Dems by 6%, and the GOP drops by 6%, then that's 12%. I should have said swing, not margin.

Well yeah, if they actually manage to win nationally by ~11 or 12 points, they win the House, sure.  Of course, they haven't actually won by 11+ points since 1982.  It's a heck of a swing.  I think the more interesting question is whether they can win some of those seats they lost this time by 12, 13, 14 points even if the national margin only shifts by ~7 or 8 points.  Is that likely?  Or has their structural disadvantage really grown so much now that they need to win the popular vote by more than they've managed to do so since 1982 in order to get a majority of seats?

People were saying this in 2005 and they still pulled through. For all we know, the gerrymander is 8 years old and now might not be as powerful as populations have changed.

[Person Man]

NBC/WSJ:
Approval: 44%
Disapproval: 48%

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/trump-s-job-approval-stands-just-44-percent-partisan-splits-n725621

that poll also has congressional approval rating at 29%, about 20 points higher than you usually see it.

That's because Republicans are understandably happier about things than usual.

The poll also shows that the percentage of people saying the system is rigged against them flipped to negative for the first time in over a decade. It used to be a statistic used by Bernie types to argue against neoliberalism. Kind of makes you wonder that some of those people were just Republicans unhappy about Obama.

I think the Bernie types have mistaken a lot of the anti-establishment sentiment of the white working class as animated by opposition to neoliberalism, when in reality it has been anti-cosmopolitanism.

^^^^^

And about as "deplorable" as Bernie people are "against capitalism". They all lie on a spectrum from just thinking they are not ready to fully embrace what they think is strange or new to honest hatred of anyone and any thing they that they don't consider White, Christian, or American.

[Person Man]

Gallup:

43% (nc)
51% (nc)

It doesn't seem like his congressional address gave him much of a bounce.

3/4 update:
Gallup:

43% (nc)
51% (nc)

Def no speech bounce... but no drop from Sessions either, yet.

Evidence that he is preaching to the choir.

Or that everyone is. My guess is that everyone is just preaching to the choir. I could well be that Trump is stuck between 39 and 45 (slightly unpopular), much like he was during the election. The only way he gets into the 45-50 range is if we all the sudden have some YUGGE economic miracle. The only way he gets to be truly popular by any reasonable imagination is that he gets his chance to become America's Blue Line the way W did between 9/11 and there all the sudden being thousands of dead soldiers when barely 100 died in the actual "war"  and there being hundreds of thousands of dead civilians.

The only way he becomes unpopular enough to be easy to beat or easy to contain is that we have recession.

[Person Man]

The AHCA is anything but popular as well, polling at 24/49.

Tom Cotton was right... if AHCA passes like that the GOP is going to lose the House.

The big question then is if Democrats campaign on repealling the repeal or on for a new law or just push Clinton style reforms like HIPPA and SCHIP that arent enough.

[Person Man]

President Trump isn't winning acceptance as a good and effective President from those who voted for Hillary Clinton. Grudging acceptance of him as President? Sure. Lots of people by now must have the misconception that his middle name begins with the letter F by now -- and it doesn't stand for Francis, Franklin, Frederick, or Felix.  Or even "Fido".  He has done little to build trust. He's still waging a grudge against someone who can never be President again.

It is below his vote, and at this stage he will need miracles just to avoid losing his three closest wins of 2016 -- Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin -- in 2020. That's before I even discuss Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina.

Americans wondered what it would be like to have a non-politician as President, and they are finding out.

Yeah. Three things need to happen for him to do better next time: A black swan event that scares people from voting against him, the next D nominee being less acceptable than generic D,  and him simply now being given the benefit of the doubt. That worked for W but Trump has a bigger hill to climb.

[Person Man]

Trump plummets to 37/58 in Gallup. A new low.

Definitely a special boy.

[Person Man]

Yeah, if there's an economic downturn before the midterms or 2020, it'll be a massacre.

Basically 2018 will be a reverse 2010....and maybe that lulls enough people into complacency or moderates Trump enough that he wins a couple of extra really close states or loses one or two of the big four but sill wins.

Or else 2020 will see maybe a couple of states he won by DDs flip...or at least all of them that didn't.

But for we know, he might try to engineer a another mid size or bigger war to make him a hero or "the horse in midstream" or creates a bubble to postpone the downturn until 21 or 22.  Maybe Democrats implode. Who knows?

After all of this, anything could happen.

[Person Man]

We are pretty much back to where we were in late 2005/ early 2006, with a Republican lock on everything that only had a 37- 40% approval rating and a growing mantra that "Conservatives are incompetent and Liberals are unelectable". Even the economy is at a shaky B- like it was then where things are steady but there is nothing really going on except that investors thinking that things will be OK because the ruling Government will do anything for rich people.

Things are even similiar down to where we have a SCOTUS openning, a very old liberal on the Court, and a congress that currently wants to be the first Congress to pioneer cancelling a major part of the safety net rather than conditioning/austeritizing it.

The only differene is that we aren't losing a hundred people a month in the Fertile Crescent in the war there.

[Person Man]

When did Bush abandon privatizing Social Security?

[Person Man]

It is definitely time for the Democrats to make their comeback or last stand.

[Person Man]

It is definitely time for the Democrats to make their comeback or last stand.

Does "last stand" imply that they're at risk of dying as a political entity?  If so, I disagree with that premise.  Both parties have been in awful shape in recent history, and have still been able to come back as strong as ever.  I would say that we should begin evaluating whether Democrats are dying if Republicans start getting 40% of the Latino vote, 20% of the black vote, and control all three branches of government in 2022.  Not sooner than then, though.

That will happen if Democrats can't deliver. They have to deliver or die if the Republicans now have so little credibility. What do you say of an opposition that is not effective against such an unpopular establishment? There is opportunity now, but the opposition must deliver

[Person Man]

So basically with Gallup it's this?

Delusional.

Just did a universal swing from 2016. See nothing delusional about it.

1.) Universal swing isn't a thing, especially since I guess he is much more unpopular in states like CA than in KS. If he's at 70% disapproval in CA and NY, that explains a lot.
2.) You're focusing on one poll (Gallup) and ignoring others (PPP, etc.).
3.) The election is more than three years away. We don't even know who the Democratic candidate will be.
4.) Democrats aren't winning in Tennessee or Kansas.

@Arch: I definitely agree that his numbers are awful (unsurprisingly) - and I disapprove of his presidency as well -, but this map is just nonsense. These landslides are unlikely to happen in a polarized country.

Most likely, he will lose the trifecta next year and that will balance things out to where he wins by a similar margin as in 2016 in 2020...or the fact he will still most likely have the senate will cause him to lose by about half the margin the polls currently suggest. I see him losing all the states he didn't win by double digits save maybe SC for Iowa. Either this or he is gone before 2020 or the country has moved too far to the right to ever not vote Republican.

[Person Man]

McClatchy / Marist (3/22 - 3/27)
Approve: 38%
Disapprove: 51%

Generic congressional ballot:
Democrats: 47%
Republicans: 38%

Around D+9 is when the House has a chance of flipping, so this is good this early on.

It is, and this is good news indeed. While the generic ballot technically isn't for state races, it still represents a rather broad view of how the public feels about one party over the other. If these numbers hold in 2017, it could be pretty bad for the GOP in NJ/VA.

However, personally I feel like these numbers are still "reactionary" and not durable. Trump has been under a never-ending stream of scandal or generally bad news coverage, so it's not surprising his approvals/the GOP's numbers are down. I'm not convinced Democratic support on the generic ballot has reached a durable state, where the public is so fed up with Republicans/Trump that almost nothing that is plausible can happen to help the GOP rebound in time. I think it's possible to get there before Nov Oct-Nov 2018, but it'll take at least a year+ rather than a few months.

I think Democrats could win the House with a lower lead than 9 points. Remember that the GOP gerrymander never was made based on a so big collapse in the suburbs.

I actually looked at the tipping point House seat in 2016, and compared to the comparable situation in 2004 (which was the House election preceding the Dem. takeover of 2006).  The structural problem for the Dems in the 2010s seems to be pretty bad, and has gotten worse than it was in the 2000s.  The tipping point seat this time around was Mia Love’s seat, and she won by 12.5 points.  This compares to the national margin in the House, which was GOP by 1.1 points.  That suggests that if there was a uniform swing, you’d need to have the Dems win nationally by more than 11 points in order to take back the House.  There just aren’t that many seats that the GOP won this time by single digit margins, so you need a big swing for them to lose the House.

Of course, there won’t be a uniform swing, so maybe the Dems can count on a larger than expected share of the swing taking place in competitive districts.  I looked back at the 2004 election, and if you do the same analysis there, you would predict that the Dems would have needed a 7.7 point national victory margin in 2006 to take the House.  They ended up winning it with an 8.0 point margin, but that was with winning 15 more seats than they actually needed, so the prediction based on a uniform swing from the past election overestimated how much work they needed to do, and it might be the same for 2018.  But I still wouldn’t count on anything less than at least a high single digit popular vote margin of victory being sufficient.

It could cause a situation of a lot of civil unrest if it becomes the case that the government gets reelected and elected despite losing by wide or at least clear and convincing margins. At that point, It would just take a really bad recession to push this country over the edge. Poll after poll seems to hint at that.

[Person Man]

From the Loof-Lipra polling service:

Trump approval/disapproval -- 44/44 (Georgia), 38/64 (Minnesota), 42/52 (Ohio)

Septic Polling Associates, 30/65 Illinois. Same for both approval and favorability.

FxO News poll. Inniada. 43-43.

Quipinniac, Connecticut. 22-70 Approval and favorability.

Matt Dillon High School, Dodge City, Kansas. Kansas: Trump arprooval 41, dssaprooval 55






Favorability:

Still useful for some states.


Approval:

Even -- white



Blue, positive and 40-43%  20% saturation
............................ 44-47%  40%  
............................ 48-50%  50%
............................ 51-55%  70%
............................ 56%+     90%

Red, negative and  48-50%  20% (raw approval or favorability)
..........................  44-47%  30%
..........................  40-43%  50%
..........................  35-39%  70%
.......................under  35%  90%

White - tie.
 
Colors chosen for partisan affiliation.  

This just confirms two possibilities at this rate-

The pendulum is swings back again

We are entering a period of decline and potentially institutional extinction over the long but sooner than you think future as an incompetent conservative Government perpetually stays one step ahead electorally of an incompetent liberal Opposition. See Britain the last 7 years and over there, the disaster just keeps getting worse and worse. That country is literally falling apart as it is being run to the ground aided partially by an even less capable opposition. The people over there are literally being cucked hand over foot! 

[Person Man]

Down to 38 in Gallup

http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx

Stabilizing around -15-20? That could be good-ish and bad news for him at the same time.

That is probably where we will be with a healthy economy. This is where Bush was before things got reallt bad for us all.

[Person Man]

Or... in the range in which people can tolerate his failure for an extended time. Democrats may be thinking "this is the price we pay for making big gains in Congress and state legislatures, and we get big rewards in 2020 for putting up with a President that we despise."

If it gets much worse we have the possibility of mass unrest with horrible consequences for the economy and foreign policy. There are countries with excellent intelligence services that could be extremely hostile to President Trump, especially should he start governing far more like a dictator than he does now. A hint: some of these countries have alliances with the USA.

You mean a situation where there are constant protests, police "no go" zones in most cities and suburbs, and Germany and France doing what Russia did last year?

[Person Man]

The big question is if the same can and will be applied to a stronger economy. If economy will colapse it is for sure, but what if it will be just pretty good.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/05/private-payrolls-grew-263k-in-march-vs--185k-est-:-adp.html

Right now it probably does not matter much, but if this trend will keep on, I can see Trump benefitting from it.

He surely can. The incumbent party also enjoys the benefits of a good economy, even if they had nothing to do with it.  It's possible if Republicans/Trump get their act together and pass tax cuts and infrastructure spending, they could give a small, temporary boost to it as well. However, I personally still think the risk of some sort of recession over the next 4 years is considerable. The current economic expansion is getting close to historic levels. I know they don't just "die" of old age, so to speak, but the historical pattern is worrying.

For what it's worth, The Australian economy hasn't had a recession since the early 90s but we never had expansion longer than 10 years. People think that since Trump is a billionaire, that he will be good with everyone else's money. Especially people who are professional money people. But it just seems like common sense that just because you have a lot of money doesn't mean you will make money for other people. In fact, the opposite is often true. This speaks nothing to policy but I don't see how the economy can be stable through so many things that destabilize the global environment where people work.

[Person Man]

Mid 40 (and only down single digits) nationwide at the Midterms would be okay cause I still think that the numbers are skewed towards the Dems because of the sample sizes which again overestimate Dem turnout at the polls. The low information, low energy voters who won't turn out are leaning towards disapproval because they mostly get their "information" from the mass media which is heavily against Trump.

So, Mid 40 would eventually be something like a tie with again California, Illinois, New York skewing it nationwide, so in the important Senate States like Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Ohio it will be a 50+ approval with the electorate what will be hard for Dems.

I'm still very much calm and optimistic about my 56+ seat projection.

I have seen little that  he has done right so far with supposedly all the assets that a new President could have even if I make allowances for my partisanship. He so far has created rifts in his own Party between the Big Government right-wingers and the comparative libertarians while solidifying his liberal opposition.   

So long as an economic downturn does not hit early and hard he won;t have that as a problem. It takes some time for people to recognize that the economy has collapsed -- Hoover got a few months of leeway -- just not enough. A foreign-policy fiasco? Approval ratings for Jimmy Carter went up as Americans rallied behind him -- but we know where that went. 444 days were just too long.

So where will the approval rating of President Trump be in November 2018? If it is high, then his success will be the ruin of the Democrats  in the Senate so that all that they can stop will be Constitutional Amendments. But if it is low, then people will turn to House elections to put a check on an unpopular agenda.

Millions of Americans have a visceral hatred for him, and if he is to become effective he must resolve that. Can he work miracles? I doubt it.

The President's Party usually loses some seats in the House, at the least. The Senate?  Probably not this time, as there are no easy pickings for Democrats and plenty of shaky seats.   

At this point, I can almost believe that Trump will be at large for a while because Bush was started out unpopular and was eventually popular...or at least Democrats were unpopular for a disproportionate anount of time. We will never know if it was because he was solely because he was a "war president" or if Democrats were really that off point with style and policies.

[Person Man]

Like what? Go to a level that makes him borderline polarizing than unpopular? Maybe 44-45%?

[Person Man]

Gallup

Approve 40% (+-0%)
Disapprove 54% (+-0%)

So his attempt to improve his numbers by bombing Syria failed.

I'm not so sure. The day that rolled off the average was a relatively decent day for him. But we'll have to wait and see how the next few days roll out.

If that's the case, maybe he hasn't changed the game but simply gave those 41-43%er a reason to support him this week?

[Person Man]

ABC / WaPo also conducted a poll on the Syrian bombing:

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http://www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1187a1StrikeonSyria.pdf

That's interesting to me. It probably doesn't hurt Trump much (but neither does it help him).

Seems about right.

We are definitely better off without Assad. Of course he could be replaced by someone worse.

[Person Man]

So despite bombing several nations, he's gone from -13 to -10 in the approval ratings sweepstakes. Good job, Donnie. Looks like his presidency will be an unmitigated popularity disaster. He's running far behind Obama's ratings in general. Cannot wait for the recession that will cause Trumpy's ratings to crash through the (already low) basement.

Obama was very likeable where as Trump is not so that's the difference. Obama was personally popular but his policies weren't popular.

Obama was elected with 53% of the vote and was fairly popular until 1 year into his White House. I think for most of his tenure he was at around tied, or up or down by 3-4%. Trump is substantially much more politically unpopular. I think Republicans ignore the enduring unpopularity of Trump at their own political peril; you won't see his supporters engaging that he's unpopular and will remain controversial and unpopular.

I'll add here that Reagan's and Clinton's popularity helped buoy them through difficult times; ditto George W. Bush. In fact, a lot of Clinton and Reagan's legacy remains today because of how popular they were as Presidents and ditto Obama today.

The base should bear that unpopular presidents are usually unable to see their legacies remain enshrined in national law and see their goals quickly undone. Again, I have alluded to the Trump recession coming our way, and if Trump is at 41% and moves to 31% by the time of the recession, Trump could be in true political peril with the myriad of scandals around him.

And because he's a Rich Republican, the media is downplaying the risks against the markets. They did the same with Bush in his second term. "The economy is great", "equities are booming", "taxes are affordable", "you can buy a respectable  house with modest finances". Now, with a modest jobs report the media says "the job market is healthy". Last year, they would say "more people are working, but the UE is only going down because college kids are moving back to thier mom's basements and guys in Indiana are going on SSI"

[Person Man]

Rassmussen Reports

44% Approve
56% Disapprove

-----------------------------------
27% Strongly Approve
46% who Strongly Disapprove

This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19

Really bad for the President -- considering that the pollster is Rasmussen.

Just curious - do you happen to know what Obama's typical "strongly disapprove / approve" numbers were in 2010 & 2014?

Edit: I'd like to compare Gallup's, but from 2014, AP's Dec poll showed these sort of numbers for a 41% approve / 58% disapprove:

http://surveys.ap.org/data/GfK/AP-GfK_Poll_December_2014_Politics.pdf



It's not the best, but Obama did at times post similar "strongly disapprove" numbers, but for sure Trump seems to be bringing in much more consistent and sometimes larger strongly disapprove figures than Obama did, at least depending on what polls you use to make that judgement.

Note that I am talking about 2020 and not 2016.

Obama apparently never got close to the 50% level of 'strong disapproval' that I associate with Donald Trump. I am tempted to believe that 'strong approval' and 'strong disapproval' are set as if in concrete. With 'strong approval' one has some room for an occasional disappointment, perhaps with the rationale 'nobody gets everything he wants'. With 'strong disapproval' one has room for an occasional instance of something going right with such a rationale as 'a stopped clock is right twice a day'.  Less-marked approval or disapproval is shakier. Yes, it is possible that  a politician can make a complete turnaround -- or more likely that a potential voter makes a dramatic change in his core values. The latter has great significance should that here be some cultural change that changes the  core values of masses of potential voters (as with the rise of the Religious Right during the Carter Presidency).

People can occasionally harbor 'slight disapproval' for an incumbent President and still vote for him -- because the challenger is a weak campaigner, offers practically the same, or stands for things that one dislikes. Strong disapproval? You might vote for the challenger and you might not vote altogether.     

46% will never vote for Trump and 40% will always? ok.