One chart shows why House Republicans are fleeing, and it shows that Trump has never had a positive approval rating for a single day of his presidency.
Howard Fineman tweeted this chart as an explanation for why House Republicans are abandoning ship:
No president since the invention of polling has been “underwater†on job approval for his entire tenure, starting on Day 1. â¦@realDonaldTrumpâ© is accomplishing that feat and now, again, he’s sinking deeper into the abyss. Why do you think so many House #Gopers are quitting? pic.twitter.com/o1nWB9BOge
— Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) September 4, 2019
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Modern presidential approval ratings date back to the 1940s and the Truman administration. Never in the history of polling has there been a president as consistently unpopular as Trump. All presidents have their ups and downs, but there has never been a president who has never had a popular moment during his entire administration until Donald Trump.
Trump’s numbers are firmly locked in, and as the Real Clear Politics chart that Fineman tweeted reveals, they are moving downward.
This is not a president who is on the upswing.
If House Republicans saw that Trump had positive momentum, they would not be leaving in droves.
The numbers show that Trump is sliding, and he has reached the point where he is going to take other elected Republicans down with him. With more than a year before the presidential election, a lot can change, but with nearly three years worth of data on Trump, the trends have been remarkably consistent, and it is likely that Donald Trump will end his term being the only president in the history of polling not to have a positive job approval rating.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
