The Official Trump 1.0 Approval Ratings Thread

[Tartarus Sauce]

Generally, I wouldn't consider approvals in the first week to give us a solid indication yet as to what is signal and what is noise, but going from 45/45 to 42/50 seems like a noteworthy shift in the course of just one week.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Generally, I wouldn't consider approvals in the first week to give us a solid indication yet as to what is signal and what is noise, but going from 45/45 to 42/50 seems like a noteworthy shift in the course of just one week.

Less than the margin of error for approval, and slightly more than the margin of error for disapproval. It is also early.

This could be over his lie about the size of the crowd witnessing him being inaugurated and his denial of the size of the Women's March. As little as three months from now will those lies matter? Not likely. Maybe he learns something from this. Policies and their consequences will matter far more. Of course he can offend the sensibilities of people who did not vote for him in November and never will. But should he offend sensibilities of people who normally vote Republican, like farm and ranch interests, things will get ugly.

 

True, I'm not trying to draw too many conclusions from this early on. By the way, Trump doesn't really learn from his mistakes the way other people do; vindicating humiliation and seeking approval from a base of support are the primary motivating drives of narcissists, and they will engage in all sorts of self-destructive behavior in order to achieve those criteria. He will continue to make the same mistakes ad nauseam in service of his own ego.

I agree that policy and executive actions will end up mattering more, and given the current rate of things, he will likely bomb on that end as well. The independents and those whom provided tentative support will be the first to swing against him before establishment Republicans will, and his core base of supporters will be the last in line. He could easily sink to 33% approval or possibly even lower without suffering any losses from his base of core supporters.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Have we ever had a President that had mostly disapproval ratings this early in his Presidency?

No, never, nobody else comes even close. I think George Bush Jr. had roughly 25% disapproval on inauguration day and that's the next closest. And nobody since Gallup started polling with Truman started with their approval under 50%. George Bush Sr. started at 51% but didn't go under 50% until his last year, and Bill Clinton went under 50% job approval a little over 100 days in. No president has begun their term in office with approval under 50% and disapproval above 45% (or even above 25%) before Trump.

[Tartarus Sauce]

Finally we continue to find that unhappiness with Trump- and with Congressional Republicans- could help Democrats to make big gains in 2018. Democrats lead 49/41 on the generic Congressional ballot. That's partially a product of Trump's unpopularity but also an outgrowth of Paul Ryan (35/47 approval), Mitch McConnell (23/52 approval), and Congress as a whole (16/68 approval) being unpopular in their own rights.

Now those are the numbers I want to see!

+8 lead on the generic congressional ballot is higher than all but 2 of the generic polls Democrats got in the 2016 race, with one of those 2 polls being +8 and the other +10.

Although as I recall one or two other generic polls posted in this thread over the past couple weeks showed somewhat lower numbers, so I won't give any of this much stock until I see months of consistent high single digit or double digit leads for Democrats in the generic poll. If that happens, I would definitely think a backlash is brewing.

One of the most frustrating aspects this early on is that there's not a large enough data set yet to distinguish signal from noise. The numbers posted here certainly are promising though if true.

[Tartarus Sauce]

If Trump is doing the worst among the rich and is pretty darn negative with white college educated voters, the GA-06 special could be interesting.

"Over $100K" includes lots of well-educated engineers, accountants, physicians, dentists, salespeople, and two-income teaching families... I'm guessing that they don't look kindly upon anti-intellectualism that is the cornerstone of the Trump Republican ethos.  

FIFY. Trump is the party now. That's why I suspect these people are trending Democratic despite Republican tax cuts that would favor them. We've reached the point where the party has become anti-intellectual/professional.

I already mentioned in a previous post that the rise of Trump could possibly be a signal that hardliner social conservatives are more closely aligning with economic protectionists due to a mutual coalescing around cultural reactionism, which is very likely to cleavage the white, college-educated, upper-middle class fiscal conservatives away from the Republican Party over time. If cultural issues supplant economics as the coalition's unifying platform, what's in it anymore for the more fiscally conservative, socially moderate, educated Republicans if they are more culturally similar to educated liberals?

[Tartarus Sauce]

There's a limit to how far he can fall without Republicans souring on him, and we are probably close to that floor at 38%. I would expect him to hover around 37-42/54-58 territory until he begins bleeding support from his own party. Either way, those are terrible numbers to try and muster support for his administrative agenda.

Once he begins clashing with Congressional Republicans on policy and continues to accumulate scandals and defeats as his term progresses, Republican's will no longer provide him with unanimous support. Losing just 15-25% of his current favorability among Republicans could crater his job approval into the low 30s easily. It will be difficult to reduce it to below 30 and unlikely to occur before the midterms, although I wouldn't be surprised if he consistently registers in the 20s by his last year if his tenure unravels into an absolute free-fall over the years.

Still, anything below 40 percent approval virtually guarantees substantial losses for Republicans in the mid-term, and registering closer to 30 percent by late 2018 could result in a Democratic landslide. Either way, Republicans are stuck with him whether they like it or not.

[Tartarus Sauce]

There's a limit to how far he can fall without Republicans souring on him, and we are probably close to that floor at 38%. I would expect him to hover around 37-42/54-58 territory until he begins bleeding support from his own party. Either way, those are terrible numbers to try and muster support for his administrative agenda.

Once he begins clashing with Congressional Republicans on policy and continues to accumulate scandals and defeats as his term progresses, Republican's will no longer provide him with unanimous support. Losing just 15-25% of his current favorability among Republicans could crater his job approval into the low 30s easily. It will be difficult to reduce it to below 30 and unlikely to occur before the midterms, although I wouldn't be surprised if he consistently registers in the 20s by his last year if his tenure unravels into an absolute free-fall over the years.

Still, anything below 40 percent approval virtually guarantees substantial losses for Republicans in the mid-term, and registering closer to 30 percent by late 2018 could result in a Democratic landslide. Either way, Republicans are stuck with him whether they like it or not.

They're not stuck with him, since Pence would be much better for their party AND the country (and foreign relations). They're just p***ies

I mean that they're stuck being associated with his agenda and with him being the face of their party. Voters will not put any daylight between the Republican brand and president Trump much as the establishment may hope for that to be the case. But yes, they are spineless, and it's precisely because they no longer can control the ship.

[Tartarus Sauce]

538's polling aggregate tracker also indicates his approvals have slipped over the past week, so this isn't just isolated to Gallup, it's a definitive trendline. It'll be interesting to see if this continues into the next week.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

[Tartarus Sauce]

Virginia poll:

Approve: 37%
Disapprove: 59%

http://cnu.edu/cpp/pdf/march%2028%20report%20final.pdf

Looking at the crosstabs, that survey is skewed NOVA heavy. High education, high income, voting breakdown in the past election 50-37 Clinton when the actual vote was closer to 50-44. Trump voters are definitely being underrepresented in that poll.

On that other hand, many compelling arguments could be made that Trump voters will under-participate in the non-presidential election years and that the governor's race and 2018 elections in Virginia will be NOVA heavy, so I wouldn't necessarily write the poll off either.

[Tartarus Sauce]

I meant the magnitude of the fall, both relative and absolute. Obama started at 60-70% and felt to ~45%.  Trump started at 45% (that probably is his ceiling) and now he is at ~40%.

Maybe he never actually reaches the 20s, but does it matter? oscillating between 35% - 45%, with an average rating of around 40% is pretty bad, especially for a new president. Usually it takes a new president year(s) to get to this point, and that is because after so much time, voters feel let down or disillusioned with any number of things the president did or didn't do. Trump hasn't even reached that point yet, and I think to assume his base will never become disillusioned or upset with him is ridiculous. It wouldn't take too much of his base to break away in order to pull him down further.

I'd probably have to agree with you in that Trump likely won't experience a fall quite like Obama did, but I think he can fall somewhat further still. I'm thinking 30% is easily possible under the right conditions. Either way, ratings in the 30s is absolutely toxic to the Republican Party.

The worst thing about Trump being in the 30s for Congressional Republicans is that it's a going to have devastating effects downballot during the midterms, but virtually the all the favorable approvals will be coming from Republicans, meaning the GOP Congress would have hell to pay if they tried to impeach Trump and get him out of the picture. It's a lose-lose situation.