Some early 2020 warning signs for Trump

We got a lot of polling data on Wednesday. Almost all the numbers look bad for the president.

Trump's approval rating is low nationally, but maybe it's okay in the swing states?

The takeaway: Trump’s approval numbers are bad—there is no sugar-coating that. The president’s head-to-head 2020 numbers are also pretty grim, showing toss-ups at best. Heading into the summer before election year, even state-level polling shows him down in the Electoral College. But that’s the caveat, isn’t it? We’re a long way out. That being said, let’s get into some data.

1) Trump’s approval ratings:

According to the pollsters at Morning Consult, Trump has a 43% approval rating among registered voters. That’s slightly higher than FiveThirtyEight’s house-effects-adjusted average approval rating, which sits at 41.6% today.

But there’s something special about the Morning Consult polling: state-level numbers. Using a fancy schmancy statistical technique called multi-level regression and post-stratification, they match their nationwide numbers with fine-grained census data and calculate very accurate estimates of Trump’s approval rating in each state. The results are actually quite shocking when you stare at them for a while (which I do too much of, probably).

The bad news (for Trump) is abundant: Morning Consult’s computers have calculated that POTUS’s net approval rating in Iowa is lower than in Arizona, for instance, and almost on par with the opinions of voters in Colorado and New Hampshire. This reminds me more of the map that Obama won, rather than the one Trump did. Other shockers are Texas, North Carolina and (to a lesser extent) Minnesota, which some people reckon could be competitive next fall—but these numbers don’t indicate that.

The margin of error for the state-level data is small, like 1%. Keep that in mind (or I’ll come after you on Twitter).

2) 2020 head-to-head polls:

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake has written much of what you need to know about recent polls from Michigan and Texas. They show Trump trailing Biden by 12 and 4 points, respectively. While the former seems a bit out-of-whack to me (that could be because the pollster doesn’t appear to weight by educational attainment) the latter is something we’ve seen a lot of and, I suspect, will be seeing more and more of in the coming months. Let me just say two things about the Texas poll:

(1) The poll is from Quinnipiac. That means that the methodology is sound and the numbers are come about honestly. However,

(2) The poll is of registered voters. As we’ve seen before, the registered voter population in Texas is much more Democratic than the likely voter population. That’s because white voters are more likely to turn out, and they lean right. Of course, it’s pretty impossible to know what the likely voter (LV) universe will look like a year and a half before the election, so the registered voter (RV) approach is better for today’s analysts. But keep the difference in mind as we move forward.

To me, these data indicate one thing: Trump is the underdog in the race for the White House. At best, the contest today looks like a toss-up. Indeed, I’ve written here before that his odds of victory are hovering around 40%. That’s in line with the national numbers reflecting the share of voters who want Trump to run for re-election (just 38%) or “definitely” won’t vote for him if he does (52%). Because of this, I’m not sweating my peg at 40% odds. If anything, to be honest, I could be too bullish on Trump, given the political environment today. We’ll see how I change my mind in the future. There are plenty of reasons to think it will.

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