Approval rating slumps back to normal
MAY 20, 2019
By Ed Kilgore
... I wondered if at long last we were finally seeing a significant lift in the president’s job-approval ratings of the sort Republicans had been predicting from practically the moment the man took office ...
Trump’s approval-rating average at RCP hasn’t drifted ever upward, but is back down to 43 percent. At FiveThirtyEight, it’s at 41.8 percent. Most startling of all, it’s at 44 percent in the Rasmussen tracking poll, which is the lowest it’s been since February 1. The president has been known to tweet out unusually favorable numbers from this poll. He’s not going to mention this one.
... There were all sorts of paroxysms of delight among Republicans over a 46 percent showing in a mid-April Gallup tracking poll. Gallup’s especially useful because it can enable comparisons to presidents of the past. And for a brief moment, Trump’s approval rating was above Obama’s at the same point in his presidency. Now Trump is down to 42 percent in the most recent Gallup survey, and Obama at the same juncture was at 51 percent, a level Trump has never reached in 31 months as president. Gallup also shows Trump is doing a lot worse than most recent presidents in May of their third year in office: Dating back to Ike, only Jimmy Carter was in worse shape ...
... the man’s popularity simply isn’t very elastic, regardless of economic conditions and/or the daily gyrations of his Twitter feed and the partisan conflict in Washington. And it reinforces the very high likelihood that his reelection is going to depend not on any Trump surge in approval but on dragging his Democratic opponents down into the depths of popular opprobrium right along with him, like an alligator executing a death roll to drown its prey.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/trumps-approval-rating-reverting-to-the-mean-yet-again.html
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