Last updated on April 3rd, 2017 at 02:02 pm
These are the numbers Republicans hoped weren’t coming.
In a new Politico/Morning Consult poll covering March 24-25, President Trump took a beating in approval ratings with the strongly approve/strongly disapprove showing him at an astonishing low 23/38.
There’s even more bad news for the White House, though, and this is in a national tracking poll where Trump’s numbers are substantially higher than Gallup’s*. That is to say, the Politico Morning Consult polls lean pro-Trump. For example, Trump has a 46% approval rating in the Politico/Morning Consult poll, but a recent Gallup poll had him at 36% from the same time period of March 24-26, after the disastrous failure of Trumpcare.
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Bearing in mind that this poll tends to lean pro-Trump, the decline in Trump’s approval ratings was sharper among Republicans and Independents than Democrats, and he lost his own supporters by 6%.
“The decline in Trump’s approval rating was sharper among Republicans and independents than among Democrats. In the latest survey, 81 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of independents approve of the job Trump is doing. A week prior, 85 percent of GOP voters and 44 percent approved. And among those who self-identified as Trump voters last year, the president’s approval rating shrunk from 90 percent last week to 84 percent this week.”
Drops in poll numbers are to be expected after a legislative failure like Trumpcare. However, this poll showed the Russia issue to be taking a toll as well. “Twenty-nine percent of voters call Russia an ‘enemy’ of the U.S., and 30 percent say it is an unfriendly nation. Only 7 percent call Russia an ‘ally,’ and another 22 percent say it’s friendly but not an ally. Five weeks ago, voters were divided evenly on whether Russia was friendly toward the United States.”
President Trump came into office with historic lows reflecting the divisive campaign he ran and his massive loss of the popular vote. Trump got into office thanks to a combined 78,000 votes from three states that handed him an electoral college win.
A mandate Trump had not.
In fact, a rational person would be asking themselves where all of these Trump supporters went after the election. They failed to show at his inaugural and they’ve practically disappeared on social media after the rabid Russian trolling in Trump’s favor during the election.
It’s natural for Trump to take a dive among Republicans and his own supporters after such a failure, but he doesn’t have the cushion to be able to afford such a loss. Trump has no political capital, he burned it all with nasty rhetoric, false accusations, and broken promises.
It’s going to be exceptionally difficult for Trump to get his legislative agenda through with numbers anywhere close to this, so he better be hoping for a huge bounce back.
In the Gallup poll, Trump is not recovering; to the contrary, Trump lost another point today and now stands at 35% approval rating.
*Methodology and respondents might explain the discrepancy between Gallup and the Politico poll. The Gallup poll has a + margin of error and the Politico poll a +2.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
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