Trump approval ratings thread 1.1

[pbrower2a]

Some of y'all really need to get help for your trump derangement syndrome.

The fact is that healthy, functioning adults don't need to check this stuff daily in order to feel good about themselves.

It honestly feels like a non-negligible amount of you people's lives are committed to destruction of your political enemies.

For example, I am convinced that the poster "mondale won 1 state" does not have a day job.

I have a statistical chronicle of the failure of the Trump Administration.

Yes, Donald Judas Trump alienates me.

[pbrower2a]

Politico/Morning Consult:

39% Approval (20% Strongly)
56% Disapprove (43% Strongly)

Source

These are Trump's worst numbers for this poll. Only 73% of Republicans approve of Trump.

If this continues, it spells midterm disaster for the GOP.

I'm not so sure.

Russia will help their beloved one again.

The Russian government and the Russian Mafia abandon hopeless liabilities fast -- and with very nasty means to those who cannot pay what is expected. 

[pbrower2a]

Why do 5% of Black people have a favorable view of white supremacists?

5% of people have a favorable opinion of just about anything. You could probably find 5% of people who had a favorable opinion of cancer.

I have a favorable view of pancreatic cancer -- so long as it afflicts someone like Charles Manson. Otherwise, no.

[pbrower2a]

GW Battleground poll, Aug 13-17, 1009 RV

Approve 42
Disapprove 55

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Generic Congressional: 46D, 40R

Favorables:

Trump 41/56
Ryan 36/48
McConnell 19/46
Pelosi 34/50
Schumer 27/29
McCain 53/36
Sanders 52/39

The background questions are damning.

[pbrower2a]

538: 7 Rules For Reading Trump’s Approval Rating

Remarkable. Because we can't see the future (although I could easily predict that President Trump would be a major disappointment due to his behavior including his campaign promises and his rhetoric) we cannot see the Big Picture which which includes the next four or eight years. How short-sighted can we be? Think of how Americans saw the world in November 1941 in contrast to how it would be in November 1945.

So what did I see?

I saw him offending nearly a majority of the electorate no matter what he did as President. His rhetoric is rigid, reflecting a rigid set of values, and it offends too many sensibilities for him to win over people from among those who voted against him. The 46% of the vote that he got is the maximum that he could get under any circumstances. People who dislike him are given no cause to be proud of being an American except to show how uncharacteristic he is of America, let alone of prior Presidents. Getting 46% of the vote? That is about what Dukakis got in 1988 and McCain got in 2008, and both are considered electoral losers -- decisively so.

Contrast John F. Kennedy, who barely won the Presidency, and who had the ability to infuse optimism in people who did not support him initially. If one feels good about oneself one is likely to feel good about many things that over which one has little control -- like one's employer, the economic system, popular culture, and the political process. Was America ever happier than during "Camelot"? Maybe unless one was a Southern black left out of it, but that seemed likely to change. To be sure, Donald Trump is far from being as competent as FDR and as honest as Obama as he could be -- but he is as incompetent at infusing competence as Kennedy was good at it. If you think this a partisan screed, then replace "FDR" with Lincoln, "Obama" with Eisenhower", and "Kennedy" with "Theodore Roosevelt" or even "Reagan". If Trump isn't FDR, Obama, or Kennedy, then he isn't Lincoln, Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, or even Reagan. Of the eight Presidents mentioned  in that group, all but two are on about everyone's Top Fifteen list of prior Presidents (all but Trump and either Reagan or Obama, the choice between Reagan and Obama being on where one is on the political spectrum if they seem so dissimilar). So far Donald Trump is a disaster.  

If you thought Obama polarizing for what he is (looking as un-Presidential as he could possibly look even if his political background is fairly typical for a President, someone successful at every level of politics up to the Senate or a Governorship), Donald Trump is unlike any President in the last 120 years. He is a President without precedent, which would be fine if he were decidedly above average in political ability -- and he gets so much wrong that he looks catastrophically unfit to rule.  

(end of Part I)

[pbrower2a]

Part II:

Key points from Nate Silver:

Note: bold material and information in tabular form or the chart are directly from Nate Silver:

Proposition No. 1: It’s easy to fight to a draw when your approval rating is only 37 percent.

Before his bungled response to the violence in Charlottesville (a fascist pig driving his car into counter-protesters, killing a pretty white girl, which is the worst thing that he could do for the image of his cause), the President's approval rating was already very poor. It's like the 2003 Detroit Kittens baseball team (which challenged the 1962 New York Mess [40-120] for being the worst team in the recent era of baseball [43-119]) having a ten-game losing streak -- who notices? People who thought Donald Trump awful before his bungled response to events in Charlottesville simply had more cause to dislike his Presidency.

Proposition No. 2: Be wary of claims that Trump has hit his approval rating ‘floor’ — so far, his numbers have been declining, not holding steady.

Something that I didn't notice. Of course there is statistical noise, and I am not going to take much notice of the difference between polls by difference  in approval ratings between 40-57 and 37-58, whether between two different pollsters and their different methodologies and between two different days. Either difference is within the usual margin of error, so I don't see the immediate difference.  


But there is a huge difference between a 44% approval rating and a 37% approval rating over seven months. The trend line for this President is unambiguously downward, and such a difference is almost twice the margin of error.

Proposition No. 3: If Trump does have a floor, it’s probably in the 20s and not in the 30s.

Approval ratings for the President of the time have gone into the 20s, including Truman (22% at times in his second term), Nixon (25% at the time of his resignation), and Dubya (24%). With Nixon the problem was moral turpitude; approval of Harry S. Truman rose and fell with the latitude of the front line in the Korean War; economic events suggesting a reprise of the economic meltdown that resembled the first stage of the Great Depression.

Americans aren't hurting from an economic meltdown, and there is no ongoing calamity in the Korean Peninsula -- yet. President Trump gets to ride the good will that his above-average predecessor created even as he excoriates that predecessor. But let the Dow lose 50% of its market value or (God forbid!!!) a nutty leader in North Korea turn even one large Japanese or South Korean city is turned from a vibrant urban area into a smoldering, uninhabited, radioactive ghost town with many of its denizens turned into ghosts -- and just imagine what that does to the attractiveness of President Trump as a leader. The accusations of collusion of his campaign with the Russians (intelligence services or the Russian Mafia) are either without foundation or are well known to people (federal prosecutors and courts, the CIA, or the FBI) who have good cause to not publicize what they already know -- because they can use these to great harm to the President or those connected more effectively in a court of law than in the public domain.

He will not be able to put the blame on liberals or upon dissident conservatives with whom he never got along. Such people might want to be rid of him even if such requires a military coup. I cannot say at what level of disapproval President  puts him in such danger. Neither Truman, Dubya, nor even Nixon was anywhere near the megalomaniac that President Trump is. At the worst points of approval, the end was nigh for Truman (he was not going to run for a third term),  Nixon (he resigned in disgrace), and Dubya (close to the end of his catastrophic second term.  Americans could wait for an imminent end of the Presidencies of either of those three Presidents.  Such an end is not in sight for President Trump, which makes a big difference. There were obviously no approval polls for Herbert Hoover in 1932, but we can just imagine how those would have been in October 1932.

Impeachment? The Democrats hold all the cards on that. They would be delighted to act in concert with a large minority within the GOP to remove this President, but only if the successor is a comparative moderate who solves more problems than he  leaves intact. Mike Pence, even more illiberal than Donald Trump, would have to step down first and allow someone like Mitt Romney or Susan Collins become Vice-President and in turn '46'.

We have no quick and easy solution for Donald Trump within our Constitutional framework.

The Founding Fathers established a political system predicated upon a wise electorate in which probity was an overwhelming norm, one in which people voted generally on the basis of morality and competence of the choices that they had. Americans could have voted for a Richard Nixon without knowing of his political demons, and they got away with it. A near-majority of the  American electorate voted for Donald Trump even though his flaws (he was no more reactionary than Ronald Reagan) were glaringly obvious. We are less likely to get away with our political order intact with Trump as President than we were with Nixon.    

Proposition No. 4: Expect bigger approval rating changes from issues that cut across partisan lines.

Effective Presidents get legislative successes even if a near-majority of Americans dislike the agenda, as with Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Ronald Reagan won a landslide re-election in 1984 with about 58% of the popular vote, and Obama might have gotten about 58% of the popular vote in 2012 had he not faced (1) a challenger as astute as Mitt Romney  and (2) racial attitudes that cost him on the net  a few per cent of the popular vote. There were more people unwilling to vote for any black person than those more likely to get to the polls to vote for the first American President with some presumed African origin than for anyone else. But Obama still won. Everybody loves a winner; President Trump has practically no legislative successes so far.

Donald Trump hates President Obama viscerally -- and he is no Ronald Reagan.

Proposition No. 5: Be especially wary of expecting big changes in Trump’s approval rating from ‘cultural’ issues.

America is already severely divided along 'cultural' lines, and there are no further 'cultural' values that he can offend. He can make catastrophic blunders in foreign policy. Presidents Emeritus are often the best people to get the current President out of a nasty scrape, as Bill Clinton found Jimmy Carter useful for an ugly situation in Haiti. We have five living Presidents Emeritus (Carter, the elder Bush, Clinton, the younger Bush, and Obama), but age precluding the ability of two to solve any problems, ill health negating Clinton as a solution to anything, the younger Bush a near-recluse to some very bad choices as President, then the only viable such person to meet a danger related to foreign policy is Obama. But the current President considers his Predecessor something close to being an Antichrist, which make him unavailable for now.

Proposition No. 6: Expect bigger changes when Trump’s behavior is truly surprising or defies promises he made to voters.

President Trump made promises, and his non-successes in forcing legislation that hurts the living standards of most people. This is exactly the President and Congress that could, if given the chance, shift federal taxation from income to consumption, eviscerate labor unions with a national right-to-work (for starvation wages) law if not outlaw labor unions outright and abolish the minimum wage and hour laws established in the 1930s so that American workers could get the dubious benefits of living as badly as they did in the 1920s. His failure at undoing Obamacare has kept him from going on to even-more-unpopular parts of an agenda of the Master Class that he pretended to oppose while a candidate for President.

Donald Trump is as nasty a capitalist pig as any Marxist stereotype can offer. He did make promises of jobs, but should the economy go into the tank, then his biggest promises to the white working class which never got a real recovery from the Panic of 2008 end up a stark and unforgivable failure.

Approval ratings for the Presidents 216 days into their administrations and the subsequent election beginning with Truman were:  

Truman  33 40
Eisenhower 62 68
Kennedy 62 (assassinated)
LBJ 74 74 (identical based upon the timing of the JFK assassination and Election 1964)
Nixon 62 57
Ford NR 44
Carter 44 38
Reagan 42 58
Bush I  55 33
Clinton 47 55
Bush II 62 48
Obama 45 50

Those with approval ratings above 44% won; Ford barely lost, probably because he had no idea of how to run so much as a statewide campaign for election. Bush I had no idea of what to offer as a Second Act, Carter had a disastrous Presidency, and Truman had nine political lives going into 1945 and expended eight of those by the autumn of 1953. Dubya had gotten away with a lots of mistakes as late as 2004 and got away with them and barely got re-elected; Obama might have won re-election by a huge margin instead of a bare margin had it not been for we-all-know-what, and the rest won re-election with at least 370 electoral votes.

Reagan took his lumps early and recovered, which might be a promising analogue for President Trump in 2020. But Reagan at least solved problems that his predecessor could not solve. Donald Trump is not the new Ronald Reagan.

[pbrower2a]

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Telling, but I can't use it because it is an excellent-good-fair-poor poll.

[pbrower2a]

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Telling, but I can't use it because it is an excellent-good-fair-poor poll.

Oh hell. Just give him 28% approval for Good and Excellent combined, and 51% disapproval for Poor. Consider the rest undecided. It gets the point across just fine.

I would have done that when there was far less polling data, as Michigan is an important state in American politics again. But I have a poll of Michigan from a reliable pollster within the last two weeks, so I am not going to use this one.  Apples to oranges.

Can't wait for his ratings to start dipping below 30% after Fascist Friday.

I am now looking as much at disapproval as at approval. Not that I am saying that his polls will go below 30% approval nationwide, I cannot now deny the possibility. They so went for Truman late in his second term, Dubya late in his second term, and Nixon as he was on the brink of resignation.

But in all three cases, either (1) the Presidency was obviously soon to go to the other Party, or (2) the President's policies were not great problems but his misconduct was. There was no question of electoral fraud before the election of 1972. The system worked in all three cases to effect the needed change. A President with an approval rating in the 20s who cannot easily be replaced in a timely manner with someone clean of scandal or alleged incompetence implies unprecedented instability in our political system.

We can't be so sure now.  We are not close to the end of the Trump Presidency unless President Trump is about to resign in frustration or to have an unforeseen meeting with the Grim Reaper. Impeachment? It could be Democrats who stand in the way; Mike Pence is an anathema to Democrats. Things went swiftly once Spiro Agnew resigned, but it is unlikely that anyone has anything on Mike Pence yet. Then again, the resignation of Spiro Agnew was a surprise to all but legal insiders who knew about the scandal of bribe-taking and tax evasion. 

Get someone with some integrity who is not an embarrassing extremist as VP, and an impeachment procedure might begin promptly. But until then, we could have a Constitutional crisis and domestic unrest.

We have a nasty situation in which the FBI is investigating the President and the CIA is spying on the Presidency.  

 

[pbrower2a]

I'm interested in seeing how Trump's response to Harvey is going to be perceived. He hasn't made any obvious missteps yet (aside from the Friday news dump, but the whole point of that was for the hurricane to drown out those stories, which is probably going to happen)

True. I seem to recall a west wing episode where the press office calls Friday "trash day" and suggests that Fridays are the best day to dump unfavorable news stories, because most people are focused on their weekend. Add in the hurricane ...

The hurricane will not be the lead story in Arizona newspapers. Resignations of Sebastian Gorka and Andy Hemming are well-timed...

This President has enabled right-wing extremists, violators of human rights, cronies, and crooks. He has used his office to enrich his business interests.

It is fortunate that there is no Trump Tower in Houston, San Antonio, or Austin. Were there, then you can just imagine where the centers for government activity to get aid to the hurricane-plagued area would be. (Dallas is too far away to be relevant, and I Googled "Dallas" and "Trump Hotel" as I did with Austin, Houston, and San Antonio each with "Trump Hotel".

That fiction reflects reality should little surprise us. Fiction must have a logic far stronger than reality just to make sense.

[pbrower2a]

Furthermore he does nothing to attract his base, contrary to Reagan, Clinton and many others.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/blogs/wisconsin-voter/2017/08/25/donald-trump-has-squandered-chance-raise-populais-now-just-unpopular-he-2016-campaign-which-isnt-goo/601436001/

Even Jimmy Carter tried to cut into the early vote against him. Had he won over the sorts of people who would vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 but voted for Ford in 1976, then he would have been re-elected. It is hard to determine an ideological difference between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Jimmy Carter was simply an ineffective President, but far from the vile person that Donald Trump is. Carter attacked the economic mess that Nixon had started, but to be successful at that he would need to implement economic policies that hurt the usual constituencies of the Democratic Party. Carter could never do that; Reagan had no qualms about doing so. The hostage situation in Iran ground him down until Reagan could win in a landslide similar in the Electoral College to what FDR did to Hoover.

Like Reagan, Trump has no qualms about hurting those who did not vote for him. Such is enough to have practically ensured that he would do little better in 2020 than in 2016. But he is hurting his mass base.

With the Marist polls of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and another of Arizona I can predict based upon disapproval ratings alone that Donald Trump will lose everything that he lost in 2016 and those four states.

[pbrower2a]

Gallup, 8/26:

Approve 35% (nc)
Disapprove 60% (nc)

4th consecutive day at 60% disapproval.

Stable. The President's credibility is gone from the political center and the left. Conservative opposition is building against him.   I am not predicting that 60% of the American people will vote for a Democratic nominee for President. In 2020 we will see at most a 55-45 split between liberals and conservatives for President and other elective offices -- but much of the conservative vote will be for an independent or Third Party nominee. 

[pbrower2a]

Given that the Millennial generation is often judged as ending somewhere between 96 - 2001, the best time to see where generation z is going to end up is 2020. At that point, we'll have a handful of years in the 18 - 24 group as being genz, the number of years depending on when you think Millennials end. If they really trended more Republican, the 18-24 group should lean more Republican in 2020 compared to 2016. It's not enough for the Democrat to do a little worse, as even while Clinton performed worse among 18-24 year olds, Trump also performed worse than Romney, which was already pretty low.

Anything before then would be too ambiguous. Personally, I think that even if generation z ends up more conservative than Millennials, it won't be an immediate drop in vote share for Democrats. It would probably be a slow-ish decline, and highly doubtful it starts anytime soon. Republicans need to re-brand to make inroads with young minorities (or massive inroads with young whites) for that to happen. If it does, it'll probably be the tail-end of the genz that gets more Republican-leaning.

Also worth remembering: the Millennial Generation is beginning to reach the age (mid-30s) when some start the "high office" phase of political life. That means that they start becoming big-city mayors, State Governors, the US House, the US Senate, and Cabinet positions. To be sure, American political  leadership is often well described with the word geriatic, but that could be coming to an end. The Presidency will be out of reach for this generation until at least 2028, when the youngest of this generation reaches 46, roughly the age at which the youngest Presidents elected directly to office (Polk, Grant, Kennedy, and Obama) were elected.

Like other generations in the past, the Millennial Generation has its own economic concerns, political style -- and zones of indifference. Older generations -- Silent, Boom, and X -- do not speak its lingo. This generation is becoming a big chunk of the electorate, and low approval ratings for politicians in general reflect that older generations of politicians are failing to reach them for their concerns. It may be easy to see why President Trump has low approval ratings from all generations, including his fellow Boomers  due to incompetence, incoherence, and extremism -- but I have noticed that high-profile members of Congress fare badly even if they are nearly-diametric opposites in ideology and personality. That includes Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as well as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.


Politicians whose rhetoric and achievement do not resonate with people under 35 will get lower approval ratings than otherwise.   They have been getting away with such approval ratings so far, but one can also ask how long they can get away with such.

Its easy to see how Barack Obama could do better than almost anyone else so prominent in political life when he was President, but if he is getting 60% or so approval ratings (not that I have seen such), then such will reflect nostalgia more than anything else. Trump is making President Obama look really, really good by contrast. But he rarely got approval ratings higher than 55% once the novelty wore off.

Of course it is not a reliable prediction that someone 34 will replace someone 74. But there will be openings, and as a rule, it will rarely be 64-year-olds who supplant 74-year-olds in high office.   Of course a Millennial pol will need to address the concerns of people older than themselves. But I expect to see that. Nature abhors a vacuum.   

 

[pbrower2a]

Pew: 36-63

http://www.people-press.org/2017/08/29/republicans-divided-in-views-of-trumps-conduct-democrats-are-broadly-critical/

Democrats distrust him on issues and disparage him on conduct. Republicans think that he is fine on issues but disparage him on conduct.

Democrats are heavily convinced of his collusion with Russian intelligence services; Republicans are not convinced.

Republicans are not confident with the President on nuclear weapons or immigration, splitting about 50-50 on both issues. Trump is seen by about 56% of Republicans as competent to make trade deals. Democrats have little confidence in him on those issues.

Here are some 'person in the street' responses:



Also:



 

[pbrower2a]

So far, there hasn't been anything but statistical noise with the harvey episode.

I wonder if this is a case of people thinking the event should be independent of political judgement, or people taking a "wait and see" approach.

It will be a while before people can sort out what is going on. The rebuilding process will be delayed until the water levels go down enough to allow reconstruction.

Texas seems to have responded better to Harvey than Louisiana did to Katrina. Whether credit goes to the President Trump or to Texas officials is yet to be shown. you can watch for disputes between statewide Republicans and locally-elected Democrats.

It is bad form to brag about handling a disaster well until the disaster is over.

Maybe we will see another poll by the Texas Tribune.

[pbrower2a]

Trump in FL:

Approve 37
Disapprove 47
https://business.fau.edu/images/business/economics/departments-economics-pages/business-economics-polling-initiative/bepi-polls/files/2017-08-28_BEPI_Results_with_Toplines.pdf

http://wvmetronews.com/2017/08/31/justice-trump-capito-and-manchin-metronews-west-virginia-poll-evaluates-approval/

West Virginia approval ratings:

Trump 48/39
Manchin 51/34
Capito 40/38
Justice 34/44 (lol)  

Great poll! /s

Huge change in a state that gets polled rarely. If you are a partisan Democrat who dreams of West Virginia reverting to the political orientation that it had in the 1990s... here is a portent. President Trump is still above water, but much less than where he has been.

Outlier? Just watch for another poll. People go from approval to 'undecided' to 'disapproval', or vice-versa. This looks li9ke 'vice-versa'.

Party-switching Governor Justice may have blundered. He had no indication of the switch being trouble. This said, President Trump had more room for a fall in approval ratings in West Virginia than in neighboring Pennsylvania, let alone Virginia or Maryland.

Surprisingly, I have no polling on Ohio other than the Gallup composite from January to July.

Florida. I am going to have to take the approval rating literally but keep the old disapproval rating. 37% approval for a Republican President is simply freakish.

In both Florida and West Virginia, approval may be going from positive to undecided. Polls are like stills in movies, showing only a moment.

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)
..........................  44-47%  30%
..........................  40-43%  50%
..........................  35-39%  70%
.......................under  35%  90%

White - tie.


Now for the theme of disapproval as shown in the Gallup data and subsequent polls:

navy under 40
blue 40-43
light blue 44-47
white 48 or 49
pink 50-54
red 55-59
maroon 60-69
reddish-black 70+

[pbrower2a]

So far, there hasn't been anything but statistical noise with the harvey episode.

I wonder if this is a case of people thinking the event should be independent of political judgement, or people taking a "wait and see" approach.

It will be a while before people can sort out what is going on. The rebuilding process will be delayed until the water levels go down enough to allow reconstruction.

Texas seems to have responded better to Harvey than Louisiana did to Katrina. Whether credit goes to the President Trump or to Texas officials is yet to be shown. you can watch for disputes between statewide Republicans and locally-elected Democrats.

It is bad form to brag about handling a disaster well until the disaster is over.

Maybe we will see another poll by the Texas Tribune.

I'd give a lot of the credit to the state and local authorities in Texas

What I expect. Texas has a political culture very different from that of any state bordering it or nearly bordering it.

I obviously see no post-Harvey polling in Texas, and I generally do not predict trends. I see nothing that President Trump that can cause his  approval to rise.

[pbrower2a]

Those WV numbers for Trump are awful.

There are possible conclusions:

1. that the collapse in Trump support is striking even states that have been strong R in Presidential elections in recent years.

2. that West Virginia is reverting to political tendencies of the 1990s and earlier. One measure of partisanship of a state is that it can vote for someone who loses in a landslide. West Virginia is the only state to have voted for someone who lost 350 or more electoral votes for a Democrat (Dukakis in 1988) and for a Republican (McCain in 2008) in the last thirty years.

3. that this poll is simply a statistical outlier and wrong

Any of the three is possible. Another poll might confirm the first or the third. The second? Watch elections.

West Virginia Democrats came to depend upon coal miners for their votes when the United Mine Workers was a powerful institution while underfunding roads, public health, and education that  would prove necessary when the coal seams were worked out. Then the mine owners bought the system -- and kept underfunding roads, education, and public health. Whichever Party so operated, it would hurt West Virginia residents and in the first case led to political failure.

This time? The third and first are opposite stances.

[pbrower2a]

The good news: I found eleven state polls of approval, some of states that rarely get polled and one that, to my recent consternation, had not ever been polled since Election Day.



The bad news: it's by the much-maligned pollster Zogby.

The reports (approval- disapproval)

FL 45-52
IN 48-48 (first poll!)
KY 52-44
MI 38-57
MO 46-40 (first poll!)
MT 49-46
ND 51-44 (first poll!)
OH 45-52 (the big prize in polling if valid)
PA 40-55
WI 40-57
WV 48-48

President Trump won every one of these states in 2016. Disapproval ratings of 52 or higher in states with 93 electoral votes suggest big trouble for any re-election bid in states that have 93 electoral votes. Add to this, should Indiana be at all close... a Republican is invariably winning the state by 10% or more if he is winning nationally.

The graphic is hard to read. and I hope that I read these right.

Polling is consistent with what I have seen for Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, so if the polling uses the same methodology for the other states, then this polling could well be OK.

Here are some matchups -- Donald Trump vs. Elizabeth Warren:



In these matchups, Warren picks up all states in which Trump disapproval is 52 or higher... and Missouri. In view of polls of Arizona and Iowa in which President Trump has a disapproval rating of 52 or higher, I can see her beating Trump almost as severely as Obama beat McCain. She is within 6% of Trump in Indiana, and no Republicans wins nationwide while winning Indiana in the single figures.

I have not been paying attention to individual matchups because there is no obvious front-runner among Democrats for the nomination in 2020... but this one is illustrative.

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)
..........................  44-47%  30%
..........................  40-43%  50%
..........................  35-39%  70%
.......................under  35%  90%

White - tie.


Now for the theme of disapproval as shown in the Gallup data and subsequent polls:

navy under 40
blue 40-43
light blue 44-47
white 48 or 49
pink 50-54
red 55-59
maroon 60-69
reddish-black 70+

[pbrower2a]

August 17-23 for the statewide Zogby polls.

The polls of Michigan, Pennsyolvania, and Wisconsin are clos to the results of the Marist polls of those states.

It's an interactive poll... and in 2012, interactive polls proved better than average.

[pbrower2a]

navy under 40
blue 40-43
light blue 44-47
white 48 or 49
pink 50-54
red 55-59
maroon 60-69
reddish-black 70+

Aren't some of your shades of pink backwards here? IA, FL, and OH should be redder than NC and GA right?

I may have used intensities of "2" and "3" for pink. I hope to correct that on my next map.

[pbrower2a]

Now for the probabilistic model of random chance in an election when a nominee needs eight wins in independent events.  The probabilities for each state can be seen as P(ST), with "ST" as the stand-in for the postal code for each state. Figuring that President Trump is in the position in which he must win eight states in which his approval rating is 55% or lower, and that one of those is New Hampshire, in which his approval rating is 55%...

His chances of winning the election are the product of

P(AZ), P(FL), P(IA), P(NV), P(NH), P(NC), P(OH), and P(TX).

1 represents a sure win, and 0 is a sure loss. Any loss among these states implies that he is defeated.  Remember  -- the product of zero and any finite set of numbers is zero.

50% chance in each state? That gives him just less than 4 chances in 1000 of winning. at 0.00391, stopping at three significant digits.

So let's see how things change as the percentage goes up.

.55    0.00837
.60    0.0168
.65    0.0319
.70    0.0576
.75    0.100   
.80    0.168
.85    0.272
.88    0.360
.90    0.430
.91    0.470
.92    0.513

Of course the President, should he be getting 92% chances in all of these  states, is probably making things tighter in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and is changing the assumptions about the election.  But at 80% in all eight states, what happens if his chances go to .95 in Texas but .25 in Iowa?  His chance falls from 17% to about 6%. The chance for the President depends far more upon his weakest state than upon his strongest state. Now let us suppose that Trump has shored himself up in Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas to make them effective certainties at .95, but New Hampshire has gone to .10 and Iowa has gone to .25... the chance drops to about .00656...  one chance in 152. Ouch!

...and if you are a partisan Democrat and see polls showing effective certainty in all states (except New Hampshire) in which his disapproval ratings are now 55% or higher, and go to the Democratic Party headquarters for a celebration, and you get a quick call of New Hampshire as a Democratic win while Democrats are picking up the states that you expect to be easy wins -- all that remains is the formality of a network journalist calling exactly what you expect.  Some time around 11PM eastern time you might await the countdown for results from states on the West Coast as the Democrat has 196 or more electoral votes as 74 sure electoral votes from sure states for a Democratic nominee get called as a formality.   


   
     

[pbrower2a]

New Jersey, Rutgers-Eagleton

Donald Trump approval 30-65

Chris Christie 16-79 approval

Robert Menendez 28-25 favorability

Cory Booker 54-23 favorability

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)
..........................  44-47%  30%
..........................  40-43%  50%
..........................  35-39%  70%
.......................under  35%  90%

White - tie.


Now for the theme of disapproval as shown in the Gallup data and subsequent polls:

navy under 40
blue 40-43
light blue 44-47
white 48 or 49
pink 50-54
red 55-59
maroon 60-69
reddish-black 70+

[pbrower2a]

(updated due to a poll in New Jersey that shows a huge swing since the last polling data)

If you put all states with a disapproval of less than 55% in his column, he's still relatively close to 270 electoral votes.

One must draw a line somewhere to show that some tipping-point state defines victory and loss.  This could be percentage of the vote  or margin.

DEM  REP  DIS ΔEV  STATES
000  538   80   03      DC
003  535   71   58      CA VT
061  477   66   11      MA
072  466   65   14      NJ
086  452   64   10      MD
096  442   62   29      NY 
125  413   61   13      VA
138  400   59   24      CT HI WA
161  377   58   20      IL
181  357   57   45      CO MI MN WI
222  312   56   15      DE NM OR
241  297   55   32     ME* NH PA RI TIPPING POINT/ZONE
273  265   54   11      AZ
284  254   53   06      NV
290  248   52   53      FL IA OH
343  195   51   36      TX
381  157   50   37      GA NC UT
418  120   48   16      IN WV
434  104   47   06      AR
440  098   46   19      MS MO MT
459  079   44   12      ND SC
471  067   43   16      LA NE* SD
487  051   42   29      ID KS KY TN
516  022   39   22      AL OK WY
538  000

*Maine and Nebraska divide their electoral votes.

ME-01 is more Democratic than Maine at large, which is more Democratic than ME-02 (which went to Donald Trump in 2016). Maine-01 is somewhat urban southern Maine, including Portland, and ME-02 is very rural, comprising central and northern Maine.

NE-02 (mostly Greater Omaha inside Nebraska) is less Democratic than ME-02, so in a normal election it is more likely that Maine gives an electoral vote for a Republican than that Nebraska gives an electoral vote to a Democrat. But NE-02 went for Barack Obama in 2008. It is much more Democratic than Nebraska as a whole. NE-01, eastern Nebraska (including Lincoln and some parts of Greater Omaha) is slightly more Democratic than Nebraska as a whole. NE-03, including very rural central and western Nebraska (including Scottsbluff and Grand Island) is one of the most Republican districts in the USA, and is so strongly Republican that

(1) it can easily swing the state at large Republican, and
(2) it could conceivably offer the single electoral vote for a Republican nominee for President.

Descriptions of the states and their districts are

ME-01 -- very strong D
ME at large  -- strong D
ME-02  -- very weak D
NE-02  --  weak R
NE-01  -- strong R
NE at large -- very strong R
NE-03 -- almost as reliably R as the District of Columbia is reliably D


This chart shows how the states and DC fall as they go Democratic.  With allowance for the age of some of the polling data (oldest of which is a Gallup composite of statewide data from January to July, which I average as April data) that likely underestimates disapproval ratings of the President in some states, I get some idea of how badly President Trump will do in many states. On the whole I have a reasonable average of disapproval of the states lower than those of recent Gallup polls of nationwide tracking. Sure, California (55 electoral votes) is huge, but it is only a little more than a tenth of the population of the USA, and even Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York State, and Virginia -- 83 electoral votes altogether) are shown close to the national average of disapproval of the President.

You can argue any single state poll, but any state in which President Trump has 55% or higher disapproval is effectively gone. By picking off every such state the Democratic nominee gets just barely enough electoral votes should he get nothing in which disapproval of President Trump is 54% or lower.  President Trump's three barest wins were in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin... and polling data suggests that he can count on losing all three of those states. An easy appeal by Democrats to those three states is "Promises made, promises broken"

To win while winning all states in which he now has disapproval of 54% or less, he would have to pick off five or more electoral votes from states in which he has current levels of disapproval of 55% or more. Conveniently those would have to be the ME-02 (which President Trump won, and for which I have no polling data) and New Hampshire (one of his barest losses in a usual swing state). That is stretching things.

But that leaves President Trump with practically no room for error. He could conceivably lose only one more electoral vote, the unlikely loss with nothing else of NE-02, which means that there would be a 269-269 split of the Electoral College with the Presidency chosen in the House of Representatives. President Trump is doing so badly that he could hand the Democrats a majority of House seats in this unlikely scenario.

The problem that President Trump has in the polling isn't that he has 71% disapproval in California. It is that he has 54% disapproval in Arizona, 51% disapproval in Texas,  50% disapproval in North Carolina, and 52% or 53% disapproval in three states in four states (Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio) that Obama won twice. Yes, you can say "but it is Arizona, which hasn't gone Democratic in a close race in a century (1948 was not close even if the newspaper headline read "DEWEY WINS!", "but it is Texas, which hasn't voted for a Democratic nominee since 1976", or "but it is North Carolina, sort of a freak in 2008". You can say such things, but President Trump will need to win every one of those states. 

Take the Trump chance of winning every one of those states individually, and really New Hampshire because it is in the set-up condition to give Trump a probabilistic chance (it will be between 0.00 and 1.00  for each), multiply them all, and you get the chance of President Trump getting re-elected. If any of those states slides out of reach, then he is one-and-done. To reset the chance for being re-elected he must reset the public discourse on him in states in which he is faring badly. 

You can argue about any single state, but even with 268 electoral votes for the Democratic nominee in states in which disapproval of Donald Trump is 55% or higher, President Trump has many ways to lose -- as in, any state in which his disapproval is under 55%.

He actually lost Nevada in 2016, and he could easily do so again. But if Nevada doesn't get him, Arizona might. Or Florida, Iowa, or Ohio.   Texas (of all states!) could utterly reject him if he bungles the response to Hurricane Harvey. The Hispanic vote in Texas is growing rapidly, and Texas is no longer below-average in educational achievement for white people. Then there is North Carolina.  These seven states are dissimilar enough and scattered enough that the President could not offer a one-size fits all approach that could secure all seven states, and he would have to spend resources of advertising funds and personal appearances wildly in an effort to keep them all.

(So why did I not mention Georgia or Utah? Utah doesn't go to a Democrat unless the Democrat is a Mormon, and I see it more likely that a third-party conservative nominee wins Utah than does any Democrat. Utah isn't going for a Democratic nominee unless either Arizona or Nevada goes for the Democrat.  Georgia does not go for a Democratic nominee unless both Florida and North Carolina also do so).

[pbrower2a]

Trump seems to have suffered some lasting damage from either Charlottesville, the firing of Bannon, the bragging about how awesome he finds himself in dealing with Harvey, or a combination of these factors.

This is all bad and inexcusable. It is not what Ronald Reagan did, imposing unpopular (but necessary, at least as he saw it) pain for good results later. There can be no good from any of this.

There is no good side to his mealy-mouthed bungling of his response to violence in Charlottesville from American fascists. Ronald Reagan would have never made that mistake. Firing Bannon? Inevitable with what was a bad choice from the start.  One does not brag about what one does in response to a tragedy until the tragedy is over.

There is no obvious good to come from any of this. People are giving up on him, and should the hurricane lead to higher interest rates, cost of living, and taxes, and a downturn in the securities markets then a President who has promised little more than unprecedented prosperity will have nothing to back him up.

The floor for Presidential approval has been in the 20s with Truman (end of his term), Nixon (as he was approaching resignation), and Dubya (end of his second term). Trump could get there long before any impeachment process looms or before the scheduled end of his term.

A Presidency that has an economic meltdown, disasters in foreign policy, or civil unrest long before its scheduled end could bring unprecedented instability in American politics.       

[pbrower2a]

I expect him to be very strong with his base. Indeed, I expect him to excite it as few Presidents have ever excited the base. He makes his appeals to the viscera, and not to reason. Such is the strength of a demagogue, whether Hugo Chavez, Robert Mugabe, Corneliu Codreanu, or Mao Zedong.  He pretends to love the common man and hate the intellectual and small-business elites. (Hitler kissed up to the Master Class of industrialists, financiers, big landowners, and executives but offered the Jews as a scapegoat for all that was wrong in Germany).

It is not enough, usually, to win over a base. There were few Presidential nominees with such intense support among a small part of the population as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. But intense support from 30% of the public and mild support from another 5% to 10% are not enough to win an election when utter rejection by 50% of the people is enough for defeat and slight rejection by about as many who aren't ready for someone who seems extreme.   

Donald Trump has shown where his class interests are -- with those who make big, easy money -- after running as a Man of the People. He has excited people with his bigotry, male chauvinism, and nostalgia for an easier time. Now people know, and they are beginning to ask questions about the meaning of his rhetoric.

Donald Trump always was a capitalist pig -- not an innovator and never shrewd as a manager except at $crewing contractors, finding cheap labor, and making sweetheart deals with local governments. But he always knew how to appeal to the basest derives in human character. Good reasons exist to avoid appealing to the basest drives in human nature; those drives typically hurt innocent people when they are exercised.