Trump is shielded from, but not immune to, a bad economy

Donald Trump's popularity has held steady while the economy has crashed

A Happy Saturday afternoon to my subscribers.

I wanted to revisit the subject of presidential approval and the state of the economy today. Donald Trump’s presidency has prompted a very important question for political scientists over the past 4 years: is Trump immune to a bad economy?

There are reasons to think he might be. For most of his tenure as president so far, we have observed that Donald Trump’s approval ratings were much lower than expected for a president with such a strong economy—or, at least, with such ratings from consumers.

The logical extension of this finding is that an economic recession also wouldn’t hurt him that much. Until recently, we had no such recession to test this hypothesis against. Needless to say, now we do.

This week, the US Bureau of Economy Analysis released its advanced estimates for growth in the real gross domestic product for quarter one of 2020. Unsurprisingly, the projection was of a sharp contraction in the economy over the last several months. A…