Trump approval ratings thread 1.2

[pbrower2a]

Possibly a bounce from the State of the Union speech. The President stuck largely to platitudes and was better at veiling his right-wing agenda. He could of course point to greater enthusiasm by the Master Class in the economy (remember, in Trump's America, you know who matters and you know who doesn't). He was careful to even make a veiled attack on abortion by calling attention to a child adopted instead of aborted... anecdotal stuff, the usual fare of right-wingers about the effects of their ideology upon classes of people usually their victims.

I noticed that of people watching the speech, approval was high -- probably because Democrats were not watching it as readily as they would have watched an Obama speech.

About everyone to the left of the absolute center in American politics has long given up on this President. Watch for statewide polls. Donald Trump is not the Great Communicator that Ronald Reagan was.

Of course, should statewide polls start showing a move toward Trump and the GOP, then we might expect the Democratic edge in Congressional polling to completely disappear and  several incumbent Senate Democrats not only in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and North Dakota -- but also in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. You can also expect that Donald Trump will win in a landslide and supermajorities in both Houses of Congress and most state legislatures will be able to turn America into a dominant-party system in which the Republican Party is the defined "leading force" in politics.

If you don't think it possible...the 1936 (Stalin) Constitution of the Soviet Union was to a large part a plagiarism of ours. It simply had a few subtle tweaks.

...and the cops can pull my dead body out of my repossessed house. In that sort of America, the only virtue is wealth and what it can buy, and most people will be consigned to roles as desititute toilers, paid too little but facing monopoly prices, and getting to see even children's educated gutted because there will be a need for children in the mines digging out President Trump's 'beautiful clean coal'.   Government will exist to punish anyone not in groups deemed to be true believers in the Union of Christian and Corporate States.

(I suppose I have the backstory for a dystopian science fiction novel. May this all be wrong!)

[pbrower2a]

Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius Windrip, the incompetent President who is the puppet of the greediest and cruelest interests in the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here.

[Landslide Lyndon]

https://www.dailykos.com/comments/1736627/69120371#comment_69120371

My expectations: he’ll clear the low bar of giving a competent speech, cable news will swoon, his approvals will have a short bump, commenters here will gnash their teeth and rend their garments about how Democrats have thrown away their chances and a thousand years of darkness are upon us, then a few days later Trump will insult baseball or apple pie or something and everything will go back to “normal”.

[pbrower2a]

https://www.dailykos.com/comments/1736627/69120371#comment_69120371

My expectations: he’ll clear the low bar of giving a competent speech, cable news will swoon, his approvals will have a short bump, commenters here will gnash their teeth and rend their garments about how Democrats have thrown away their chances and a thousand years of darkness are upon us, then a few days later Trump will insult baseball or apple pie or something and everything will go back to “normal”.

True. He is a horrible speaker, so he isn't convincing many people to come to his political side who aren't already there. He will go back to tweeting insults that would make the late Don Rickles blush and offend people anew. By November his Congressional supporters will look like abject flunkies of the sort that one would expect in a Supreme Soviet. His SOTU speech is no masterpiece, but instead a series of platitudes interspersed with right-wing and special-interest appeals thinly veiled.

He did not have to say "beautiful clean coal"; he could have instead said "We need to use more coal to create jobs and prosperity for people left behind by people more concerned about the environment than for miners and mine owners".

Yes, this liberal could have offered a better speech, but it would have sounded much more like Ronald Reagan than by some tinpot dictator. By 2020 I expect the Democrats to have found a liberal version of Ronald Reagan and have solid majorities in both Houses of Congress, with conservatism having to redefine itself as something other than selfish, sadistic greed.   

[King Lear]

Latest Rassmusen Survey:
Approval: 49%
Disapproval: 49%
Democrats need to brace themselves, because if these numbers get any worse (I could only imagine what Generic ballot polling looks like right now), this Midterm could be a 2014-style disaster.

[Gass3268]

Latest Rassmusen Survey:
Approval: 49%
Disapproval: 49%

[Sestak]

Rasmussen had Trump at 50-50 just like 6 months back. This isn't too much of a big deal. Especially after the dossier is such a nothing burger.

Then again, King Lear doesn't even try to address any criticism of him, so this post is probably pointless.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

Latest Rassmusen Survey:
Approval: 49%
Disapproval: 49%

Good to see Rassy is still trashy

[Bandit3 the Worker]

How much is his approval going to drop after the memo release?

[Person Man]

How much is his approval going to drop after the memo release?

Probably a bump because people no longer know right for wrong, or really just want to see the world burn.

[UncleSam]

I mean barring a horrendous tweet over the weekend it stands to reason, for those of you familiar with Rasmussen's methodology, that Trump will easily hit 50% (and will probably achieve a net 0 strong approval - strong negative spread) on Monday. That's because the 49/49 was based on two days of polling post-SOTU, and Rasmussen uses a 3-day rolling average. In other words, Trump is hitting 49% now with one night of ~43% factored in (where he was pre-SOTU), which means that his numbers the last two nights (when he jumped from 43 to 45 to 49) must be well in the 50s.

Now, it's the type of temporary bump that one often sees from a speech like the SOTU. Trump saw a similar bump last year, and it was long forgotten by Election Day 2017. That being said, Trump clearly is improving his messaging as time goes on, and his garbage tweets are a bit sparser than they used to be.

I think it unlikely Trump will carry a 50% or even 45% in Rasmussen (adjust about five points down for other polls / registered voters rather than likely voters) for very long, but if he does that could be a sign of the political winds if not turning at least evening out a bit. Remember that in Virginia down ballot, Dems did very well in Clinton districts but managed almost no pick ups in Trump districts - Dems will need to find some appeal to Rs to win the house, though that is very candidate and local-issues based, obviously.

Anyone projecting doom for Dems is either a troll or very short-sighted. But I'm having a harder and harder time seeing the tidal wave mega tsunami much of Atlas has been sketching out for the better part of the last year.

[BudgieForce]

I mean barring a horrendous tweet over the weekend it stands to reason, for those of you familiar with Rasmussen's methodology, that Trump will easily hit 50% (and will probably achieve a net 0 strong approval - strong negative spread) on Monday. That's because the 49/49 was based on two days of polling post-SOTU, and Rasmussen uses a 3-day rolling average. In other words, Trump is hitting 49% now with one night of ~43% factored in (where he was pre-SOTU), which means that his numbers the last two nights (when he jumped from 43 to 45 to 49) must be well in the 50s.

Now, it's the type of temporary bump that one often sees from a speech like the SOTU. Trump saw a similar bump last year, and it was long forgotten by Election Day 2017. That being said, Trump clearly is improving his messaging as time goes on, and his garbage tweets are a bit sparser than they used to be.

I think it unlikely Trump will carry a 50% or even 45% in Rasmussen (adjust about five points down for other polls / registered voters rather than likely voters) for very long, but if he does that could be a sign of the political winds if not turning at least evening out a bit. Remember that in Virginia down ballot, Dems did very well in Clinton districts but managed almost no pick ups in Trump districts - Dems will need to find some appeal to Rs to win the house, though that is very candidate and local-issues based, obviously.

Anyone projecting doom for Dems is either a troll or very short-sighted. But I'm having a harder and harder time seeing the tidal wave mega tsunami much of Atlas has been sketching out for the better part of the last year.

Its February.

[Person Man]

How much is his approval going to drop after the memo release?

Probably a bump because people no longer know right for wrong, or really just want to see the world burn.

I’ve adopted the view that you shouldn’t help people who don’t want to help themselves

Which is great in theory, but you may not be able to escape the blast radius of the self-destruction.

[Hindsight was 2020]

I do wonder if Trump's latest approval bump is also because Gallup stopped it's daily polls

[GeorgiaModerate]

I do wonder if Trump's latest approval bump is also because Gallup stopped it's daily polls

Unlikely.  Many polls have shown a bump for Trump; there shouldn't be an assumption that Gallup daily polls wouldn't have done the same.  But even if Gallup didn't show an increase, they'd still only be one component among many in the polling averages.

[KingSweden]

I did see a theory that the GOP’s numbers have improved because Roy Moore isn’t in the news anymore. Who knows.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Interesting how Ras always has rosy numbers for Trump on Fridays the last day they poll of the week giving RW outlets plenty of time to report on it before it changes again.

That assertion isn't supported by their actual results.  Yes, the Friday result is sometimes the highest of the week; but it's also sometimes the lowest of the week, and sometimes in the middle of the week's range.  This is exactly what you'd expect as normal variation.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/trump_approval_index_history

OK, time for a mea culpa here.  I disputed henster's assertion based on a cursory look at Rasmussen's results page.  But after a systematic look at the data, there's some truth in what he says; Friday is the best day for Trump in Rasmussen's results, although the effect is fairly small.  Here's how I calculated this:

Since Rasmussen publishes results every weekday (with occasional days off around holidays), the work week is an obvious way to group the data.  For each work week, I determined the mean approval and disapproval for that week; then for each day in the week, I calculated its deviation from that average, i.e., how much that particular day's approval and disapproval were above or below the weekly mean.  Then I averaged these for each day of the week, i.e. for all Mondays, all Tuesdays, etc.  Here are the results:



This shows that on average, the Monday results are very close to the weekly average; the average Monday's approval is 0.01% above the average approval for its entire week, and its disapproval is 0.05% below the average disapproval for its week.  Tuesday and Wednesday are "bad" days for Trump; their average approvals are lower than the weekly average, and disapprovals are higher.  In contrast, Thursday and Friday are "good" days; the average Friday's approval is 0.27% higher than its week's average, while its disapproval is 0.31% lower.  This is a small difference, but it's definitely there.

A byproduct of these calculations is a weekly average for Rasmussen's results:

[Unapologetic Chinaperson]

Possibly a bounce from the State of the Union speech. The President stuck largely to platitudes and was better at veiling his right-wing agenda. He could of course point to greater enthusiasm by the Master Class in the economy (remember, in Trump's America, you know who matters and you know who doesn't). He was careful to even make a veiled attack on abortion by calling attention to a child adopted instead of aborted... anecdotal stuff, the usual fare of right-wingers about the effects of their ideology upon classes of people usually their victims.

I noticed that of people watching the speech, approval was high -- probably because Democrats were not watching it as readily as they would have watched an Obama speech.

About everyone to the left of the absolute center in American politics has long given up on this President. Watch for statewide polls. Donald Trump is not the Great Communicator that Ronald Reagan was.

Of course, should statewide polls start showing a move toward Trump and the GOP, then we might expect the Democratic edge in Congressional polling to completely disappear and  several incumbent Senate Democrats not only in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and North Dakota -- but also in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. You can also expect that Donald Trump will win in a landslide and supermajorities in both Houses of Congress and most state legislatures will be able to turn America into a dominant-party system in which the Republican Party is the defined "leading force" in politics.

If you don't think it possible...the 1936 (Stalin) Constitution of the Soviet Union was to a large part a plagiarism of ours. It simply had a few subtle tweaks.

...and the cops can pull my dead body out of my repossessed house. In that sort of America, the only virtue is wealth and what it can buy, and most people will be consigned to roles as desititute toilers, paid too little but facing monopoly prices, and getting to see even children's educated gutted because there will be a need for children in the mines digging out President Trump's 'beautiful clean coal'.   Government will exist to punish anyone not in groups deemed to be true believers in the Union of Christian and Corporate States.

(I suppose I have the backstory for a dystopian science fiction novel. May this all be wrong!)

Have you ever read the Handmaiden's Tale?

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

How much is his approval going to drop after the memo release?

Probably a bump because people no longer know right for wrong, or really just want to see the world burn.

I’ve adopted the view that you shouldn’t help people who don’t want to help themselves

Which is great in theory, but you may not be able to escape the blast radius of the self-destruction.

Meh. As IceSpear would say, “if Cletus wants to vote to get rid of all his benefits and social safety nets that he receives all because he is afraid of Muslims and Mexicans taking his non-existent job, why should that bother me?”

Because he lives in the same country I do, and when he dies from stupidity and his corpse falls in the reservoir and 3 million people die of cholera during the resulting pandemic it's going to make my life, along with the lives of the people I care about much, much worse.

[pbrower2a]

Possibly a bounce from the State of the Union speech. The President stuck largely to platitudes and was better at veiling his right-wing agenda. He could of course point to greater enthusiasm by the Master Class in the economy (remember, in Trump's America, you know who matters and you know who doesn't). He was careful to even make a veiled attack on abortion by calling attention to a child adopted instead of aborted... anecdotal stuff, the usual fare of right-wingers about the effects of their ideology upon classes of people usually their victims.

I noticed that of people watching the speech, approval was high -- probably because Democrats were not watching it as readily as they would have watched an Obama speech.

About everyone to the left of the absolute center in American politics has long given up on this President. Watch for statewide polls. Donald Trump is not the Great Communicator that Ronald Reagan was.

Of course, should statewide polls start showing a move toward Trump and the GOP, then we might expect the Democratic edge in Congressional polling to completely disappear and  several incumbent Senate Democrats not only in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and North Dakota -- but also in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. You can also expect that Donald Trump will win in a landslide and supermajorities in both Houses of Congress and most state legislatures will be able to turn America into a dominant-party system in which the Republican Party is the defined "leading force" in politics.

If you don't think it possible...the 1936 (Stalin) Constitution of the Soviet Union was to a large part a plagiarism of ours. It simply had a few subtle tweaks.

...and the cops can pull my dead body out of my repossessed house. In that sort of America, the only virtue is wealth and what it can buy, and most people will be consigned to roles as desititute toilers, paid too little but facing monopoly prices, and getting to see even children's educated gutted because there will be a need for children in the mines digging out President Trump's 'beautiful clean coal'.   Government will exist to punish anyone not in groups deemed to be true believers in the Union of Christian and Corporate States.

(I suppose I have the backstory for a dystopian science fiction novel. May this all be wrong!)

Have you ever read the Handmaiden's Tale?

I haven't. I just read the synopsis in Wikipedia... horrifying, and I'm a man.

My idea has its differences... and the name of the political order might as well be the "Union of Christian and Corporate States" that among other things

(1) claims to be Christian yet transform Jesus' Gospels into a call for 'voluntary' subordination to the Master Class.  This treatment of the Bible is heretical in the extreme -- Sell everything, and give it all to the rich so that you may deserve to live) . Why does this work? Because people who claim to be Christians often do not read heir Bibles and know what Jesus really says!

(2) holds white-supremacist views (so does The Handmaid's Tale)

(3) glorifies the most rapacious plutocrats -- slumlords, loan-sharks, warmonger arms merchants, and rip-off merchants -- and the executive elite

(4) obliterates small business (think of one of the economic roles of German Jews; many were small-scale entrepreneurs working the interstices of a plutocratic society of giant combines

(5) vilifies anything non-white. This is a white-supremacist culture, Aryan style. One of the characters finds that he is 1/32 black in accordance with a genetic test and loses all of the privileges, including the right to claim a college education.

(6) treats suffering as a virtue and any happiness as sin -- except among the elites who live in ostentatious pleasure and indulgence on the sly.

(7) persecutes anyone who does not follow the new Christian interpretation. Tough luck, Catholics, Mormons, and liberal Christians... or anyone who accepts the original Bible.

( Uses a form of Newspeak, basically transforming words into lies and limiting the range of expression so that people can't think effectively without putting themselves at risk of 'rehabilitation' in a 'charity camp'. 'Rehabilitation' implies being 'improved' into a corpse or being lobotomized.   

The trick is to not make it too much like other known examples of dystopian science fiction such as 1984, V for Vendetta, or of course The Handmaid's Tale.  I'm treating the order as a mirror image of the Soviet Union. 

This regime has war for profit, and that is its downfall. Truth usually prevails in the end.

My solution to the debilitating Newspeak is to replace the language.

[Person Man]

How much is his approval going to drop after the memo release?

Probably a bump because people no longer know right for wrong, or really just want to see the world burn.

I’ve adopted the view that you shouldn’t help people who don’t want to help themselves

Which is great in theory, but you may not be able to escape the blast radius of the self-destruction.

Meh. As IceSpear would say, “if Cletus wants to vote to get rid of all his benefits and social safety nets that he receives all because he is afraid of Muslims and Mexicans taking his non-existent job, why should that bother me?”

Because he lives in the same country I do, and when he dies from stupidity and his corpse falls in the reservoir and 3 million people die of cholera during the resulting pandemic it's going to make my life, along with the lives of the people I care about much, much worse.

The Alt-Right is the Marxoid right. Which makes sense because Populism is the right-wing alternative to Socialism. That's why they use to call themselves National Socialists.

[Virginiá]

538: Texas Dislikes Trump, But That Doesn’t Mean It Will Go Blue In 2018

The skinny: registered Texas voters are a lot more Republicans compared to adult Texans overall due to racially polarized voting and a large minority population.

[Matty]

For all intents and purposes, is there really a politically significant difference between being in the high 30s and being in the mid 40s?

It means you are still unpopular, just that the margin of your unpopularity is less.

[Virginiá]

For all intents and purposes, is there really a politically significant difference between being in the high 30s and being in the mid 40s?

It means you are still unpopular, just that the margin of your unpopularity is less.

Well, yes, I think so. It's long been noted that people who disapprove of the president tend to vote against the president's party. Not all of them - many will just stay home too. So the difference between a disapproval margin of, say, 8 is notably different than 15 - 20. Also, what kind of disapproval is important. A president with a high number of strongly disapproves is more likely to fire up his opponents. It's also hard, if not impossible, to make up significant ground approvals-wise if you have high strong disapproval numbers.

[KingSweden]

For all intents and purposes, is there really a politically significant difference between being in the high 30s and being in the mid 40s?

It means you are still unpopular, just that the margin of your unpopularity is less.

Well, yes, I think so. It's long been noted that people who disapprove of the president tend to vote against the president's party. Not all of them - many will just stay home too. So the difference between a disapproval margin of, say, 8 is notably different than 15 - 20. Also, what kind of disapproval is important. A president with a high number of strongly disapproves is more likely to fire up his opponents. It's also hard, if not impossible, to make up significant ground approvals-wise if you have high strong disapproval numbers.

Worth noting his approval number is much more volatile than disapprove