What's behind Donald Trump's record-low approval rating?
The two groups of voters dragging the president’s approval down to new lows
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Donald Trump is historically unpopular — and he knows it.
Here is the proof for the first statement. Our average of polls over at FiftyPlusOne has him at roughly 36% approve and 61% disapprove — a net -25 — among all adults, and he’s rapidly losing ground. The president set a new record low five days in a row just in the last week:
Among high-quality pollsters that released new surveys in the last week, the president’s best approval percentage among U.S. adults has been 35%. This puts POTUS lower than where every other modern president was at this point in either their first or second term — with the exception of Richard Nixon, who resigned this month in 1974. At -25, Trump’s numbers are even worse than George W. Bush’s were at this point in 2006, with the aftermath of Katrina and ongoing scandals and strains from the Iraq war weighing him down.
As for statement two, consider Trump’s tweets over the past few days. On August 1, he posted “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN.” Technically true if he means the “disapprove” number.
Then, on August 3, he ranted even more about the “RADICAL LEFT LUNATICS” rigging the polls:
This reads like someone who knows he’s in trouble, but can’t admit it to himself. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
But Trump’s incredibly low rating — barely above 1/3rd of the public — raises an important statistical. With modern levels of political polarization, it should be nearly impossible for the president’s rating to be this low. Right? About 40% of people are Republicans, and aren’t the uniformly MAGA?
The answer is that two important groups of former supporters are turning on him — and a third is incredibly activated against the GOP, too.
The data in this week’s subscriber Deep Dive show how Trump’s own voters are now less loyal to him than Democrats are hostile to him. I show this is the case for three different measures: Trump approval, the generic congressional ballot, and trust on the issues each voter says matters most to them personally.
The rest of this Deep Dive is for paying subscribers. Below, I use fourteen months of Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling to identify the two groups driving Trump’s decline the most and explain why the pattern is especially dangerous for Republicans in a midterm. Upgrade to continue reading and support the time and data collection it takes to do analyses like this one.
