Trump Approval / Disapproval - a fine point to watch

That was a NEWSMAX source that was quoting the WSJ!

 

I liked Ike.

When it came to geopolitics, Nixon was a master at geopolitics. Driving a wedge between Sino/Soviet relationship was a classic.

Reagan was an excellent Commander in Chief.

 

St Reagan cut and ran from terrorists abandoning 200+ dead marines.

He funded the start up of Al Queda calling them "founding fathers".

 

I don't share your enthusiasm for Reagan, particularly in light of his signing rather than vetoing the Mulford Act:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

 

Nixon was a crafty crook.

He lied like a rug and only got caught once.

 

I think Truman was underappreciated simply because he had to deal with so many crises (plural of crisis).

I myself would not have nuked Japan like he did.

I myself would not have authorized MacArthur to invade N.Korea.

 

From the start I have believed that Trump would go down in history like either another Reagan or another Carter.

So far Trump is tracking Carter more closely than anybody else.

 

Carter is looking like a statesman in comparison to the BLOTUS!

 

No he didn't.

He retaliated with the largest air attack since the Vietnam War.

There's more behind the story than most know. Why were the ********s all pissed off and went suicidal using a truck bomb ?

There was an Iowa class battleship off shore raising havoc with it's 16" guns killing a whole lot of camels and Islamist jihdist.

 

I concur.

I didn't approve with every thing Reagan did but as one four star general put it, Reagan didn't save America, he gave America a second chance.

 

And guess who Deep Throat ended up being once he was revealed after his death in 2006 ? The Associate Director of the FBI who was butt hurt in 1973 when Nixon didn't appoint him as J. Edgar Hoover's replacement as the Director of the FBI.

Mark Felt was Deep Throat who was so pissed off that he didn't become the Director of the FBI that he had an agenda..,.to take down Richard M. Nixon by using the WaPo.

See any correlation what's going on today ?

 

Comey was simply just appalled by Trump's ignorance.

But if not for Comey then Trump would never have been elected.

Comey would have been better off not saying anything ever.

Now Mueller takes over all the Trump investigations with a vengeance to defend the Bureau and avenge Comey.

Fun and games on the big screen.

 

Adolf and Reagan both used deficit spending to finance a huge military expansion to get out of a major recession/depression/stag-flation.

Both were successful at this.

Both were wacko too.

 

I agree. Reagan really was an excellent CIC. Ike is one of my three favorite presidents of all time. Nixon was even more of a crook than the history books record. He was a schmuck.

 

He WAS a statesman, for all of his other shortcomings. Let's please remember, the only peace agreement in the Mideast that has held, namely between Mitzrayim (Egypt) and Eretz Zisräel (Israel), was brokered by none other than Jimmy Carter, and quite directly at that.

 

Nixon ****ed up when he didn't appoint the Associate Director of the FBI, Mark Felt as J. Edgar Hoover's replacement as the new Director of the FBI. Don't **** with the leadership of the FBI, they get butt hurt very easily and can take down a sitting President.

 

The OP was created on June 17th, about 3 weeks ago. Here is an update:





The most critical two things to note are:

a.) Trump's aggregate three weeks ago was -13.7. It is now -14.8 with absolutely no overlap in polling between the time period three weeks ago and now.

b.) The biggest shift is Rasmussen, which showed the President at 50/50 +/-0 three weeks ago, whereas he is now at -10. Of the 11 polls listed here, 10 show the President in negative double-digit territory. Only one, from FOX news, shows him in negative single-digit territory. All of these pollsters, albeit with varying histories and records of success, are accredited.

I just want to remind that the first six months of a presidency are SUPPOSED to be the honeymoon period. Never in polling history has a president's approve/disapprove numbers turned sour as quickly as for Trump. Even IBD/TIPP, a very, very conservative oriented organization, has the President at -21. These are historically low numbers for IBD/Tipp and probably the most damning of them all.

So, over three weeks time, with completely fresh polling "DNA" in the mix, the picture for President Trump pretty much looks like it did three weeks ago. He is severely underwater with the american people.

One pollster can be wrong and many of them can and probably will be slightly off in one direction or the other, but they cannot all be wrong.

Now, approve/disapprove polling after the President's trip for the G20 could be very interesting to watch.

-Stat

 

Bizarrely enough I expect his approval rating to improve slightly after going to the G20!

The reason is not because of anything positive the BLOTUS has done but because of what he has not been doing. The constant stream of bad news from the BLOTUS has shifted away to the Senate and the unloved beached whale of a NJ governor.

The post facto rise in presidential approval ratings as memories dim after they leave office is what will work to raise the BLOTUS temporarily. Furthermore it is now summer and most people are more concerned with vacations and keeping their own children busy than they are about politics so they are not paying as much attention.

With that said it will be a minor correction on the long term negative trend that is inevitable given the onset of the yet to be officially diagnosed Alzheimers. I expect him to become more "reclusive" as his family try to shield the obvious from the rest of the world but it is impossible to hide given the spotlight that is trained on the Whitehouse and that the BLOTUS will demand his share of it in his more lucid moments.

 

So, it's been a week since the G20 and Trump's approval/disapproval has barely budged:





On July 9th, the aggregate was: -14.8 (approve), it is now: -14.5, a small +0.3 uptick that will not hold at all, because the newest ABC/WAPO poll released today is not yet in the mix (36/58, -22, 5 points worse than the last WAPO poll). Right now, there is considerable overlap in polls between the aggregate from July 9th and today. In one week, that will likely no longer be the case.

One thing is for sure: the G20 did not help the President's approval/disapproval ratings at all. And with the growing scandal over Donald Trump, Jr. and his meeting with the Russians in June 2016, these numbers are not likely to improve.

At 6 months into his presidency, Obama was at an aggregate of about +19, Trump is at -15, a huge 34 point difference, or one third of US adults.

I just want to remind that realclearpolitics.com is a conservative-friendly aggregator, among other things. But it wouldn't matter which source it would be, as long as all polling from accredited pollsters is in the mix. New time around I will include TPM and HuffPo's polling aggregators as well, for comparative purposes.

-Stat

 

That was a far smaller uptick than I anticipated and the revelation of the little Donny jr Collusion Emails effectively negated what was there.

This does not bode well as a long term trend. Prior to this point in time the Russian Collusion was being "dismissed" as "fake news". Now that there is documented evidence that little Donny jr has corroborated the entire focus switches to become a much more serious investigation of actual criminal activity on the part of the Trump crime family.

I don't anticipate that it will alter the BLOTUS's core support in the polls since the extremist alt right will remain loyal to the bitter end and beyond. But Independents are not beholden to the regime and are free to make up their own minds and express them without fear of "breaking ranks" and accusation of party "disloyalty".

 

So, it's been a little under one week since the last update and this one has an overlap with only one poll (Bloomberg):




About a week ago, Pres. Trump's approve/disapprove was at +14.5, it is now at -16.1. The RAS poll is not a repeater (see the sample dates), but the spread of -14 is the same.

Lots of info to glean here: we see three different polling groups: Adults, Registered Voters and Likely Voters. Please note that the PPP (D) poll, using RV, shows the same spread (-14) as the Ras poll, using LV. The highest spread (-23) is indeed from a pollster who used an Adults-only survey group (Gallup, which has it's own checkered history), but then again, so does Bloomberg, whose -16 for Trump is less than the ABC/WAPO poll showing -14.

Also to note is that with the posting from July 9th, Trump was at 50/50 with Rasmussen (which he shortly thereafter tweeted, in spite of claiming that he does not read polls), but is now at -14 for the second week in a row, a -14 downward slide for him from his most friendly pollster. For years and years, the only kind of approval/disapproval polling used Adults as the survey group, the logic for which is very simple: all US citizens who are adults should be able to form their own opinion of our president and how he is doing, regardless whether they voted or not. And surely out of the "Adults" group, most of them are voters, but often simply not asked.

In 6 of the 9 polls used in this polling DNA, Trump is at 40% or less, the highest topline for him being, of course, Rasmussen. But PPP (D) a pollster of good repute and also with a slightly conservative mathematical bias over the last 8 years, has Trump at 41%. In the toplines for disapprove, all 9 polls show that a majority of people disapprove of Donald Trump's current performance as our President, with values from 52% (Monmouth) to 59% (Gallup), but with 5 of 9 polls showing him between 55-57% disapprove. The aggregate of 39.7% approve to 55.8% disapprove, -16.1, is truly unimpressive for a President at the end of his first half-year in office.

No president in polling history has sunk this low so quickly. And with the Republican effort to either repeal or repeal and replace Obamacare looking very stalled, with the Pres. having not signed even one piece of major legislation in all of these six months, with Russiagate and an independent counsel hanging over his head, with his loose-cannon approach to giving interviews, with a major shakeup up in his legal-representation row, with him son, Donald J. Trump having very likely incriminated himself, right over twitter, with Donald Trump Sr's failure to get funds for the wall to Mexico that he promised, I would venture to say that these numbers are only going to get worse and worse for him. In all 8 years of his presidency, Obama's numbers never sunk this low. And please note that a number of Conservative pollsters are not even touching this.... they are simply not polling approval for him at all.

Furthermore, when you dig into the internals, the percentage of people who not only disapprove of the President's performance, but rather, STRONGLY disapprove, is on the rise in most all cases. And unheard of percentages from the opposition party who disapprove of him. I have never before seen the Democrats so strongly unified against a president as against Donald J. Trump.

So, six months in, the current POTUS is 16 points underwater. Those are the numbers.

 

I suspect that those conservative pollsters are polling but just not releasing the results because they would drag down the average even lower. It is worth noting that it was the extremist alt right who had the highest expectations for the BLOTUS and it is they who are being most disappointed by his failures. How can they "approve" of the "job" that he is NOT doing?

 

From my posting above, some of the internals I mentioned. This is just a small subset:











For starters...

 

Interesting to note that there is virtually no difference between Republican Approval at 82% and Conservative Republican Approval at 90%.

That tells me that the GOP is now around 80% extremist alt right.

Per Gallup the GOP is now only 25% of the electorate.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx

That would make the extremist alt right in the region of 20% which is more or less where it has always been. However the demographic shift for that part of the electorate means that it will continue to shrink.

My expectation is that the Dems will use the slogan "Hindsight is 2020" in the 2020 elections and that will keep the electorate focused on the disaster that we are seeing unfold under the BLOTUS regime. By then the influence of the extremist alt right will be up against a united opposition who know the importance of failing to vote.

 

Before we get to 2020, let's take a long, hard look at 2018. If there was ever a year for a massive backlash, 2018 may make 2010 look like child's play....

Traditionally, the ruling party does badly in mid-term elections. Even Ike Eisenhower was not immune to this. With a few exceptions, the mid-terms have been essentially a bloodbath for the party in power and the sitting president's approval numbers do indeed play a role. There have only been three notable exceptions that come to mind: Kennedy 62, Clinton 98 and Bush 02.

So, I would not doubt the self-identification in many polls. That the GOP has very possibly lost a great deal on membership is indeed possible, but not all Trump supporters are Republicans to begin with. This is all going to make for a very interesting 2018, to say the least. I suspect that at least 34 Senate seats will be up for grabs (the 33 class 1 seats plus at least one special election maybe more, who knows) and the strategema in the HOR may very well depend on how the Trumpcare/Obamacare situation plays out.