Why you shouldn't overread the drop in Trump's approvals
He's lost about all the support he can lose without shedding his core Republican supporters—and that's unlikely.
It’s never hard to make the case that someone should not rely on cable news networks or social media for political news and insights. Regardless of each network’s ideological bent, there is a tendency toward hyperbole from over-caffeinated analysts, as well as shading and cherry-picking of data.
For example, we frequently hear or read these days that President Trump’s standing with voters is “plummeting” or in a “free-fall,” and that his approval ratings are at “record lows” for this term. Yes, his approval rating has declined, and yes, it is at its lowest level yet, but we are not seeing the steep decline some suggest.
As of Monday afternoon, Trump’s approval rating is 39 percent in The New York Times average of public polls, just 2 points below his 41 percent number two months ago. In Nate Silver’s average published on the Silver Bulletin site, Trump is 3 points down from 43 percent two months ago. He stands at 41 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, one point below his 42 percent average two months ago.
As is often the case, it is helpful to look at the numbers broken down by party, which also suggests the potential for change in the foreseeable future. For that exercise, let’s look at the polls by CNN and Fox News, both of which conduct their surveys pretty regularly and publish their cross tabs.
Regular readers of this column should understand the importance of presidential approval ratings in midterm elections. Among Democrats, the CNN poll showed just 4 percent approved of Trump’s performance and 96 percent disapproving, while the Fox data showed 5 percent approving and 95 percent disapproving. These numbers would obviously translate into a radioactive situation for GOP candidates running in blue states and districts that have a disproportionate share of Democrats.
Among independents, the CNN survey showed Trump’s approval rating at 26 percent, with 73 percent disapproving, while Fox showed a very similar 25 percent approval, with 75 percent disapproving. One can conclude that, in swing states and districts with a disproportionate share of independent voters and partisans likely to offset each other, this translates into a very dangerous situation for Republican candidates in these most competitive constituencies.
Among Republicans, the CNN poll showed an approval rating of 80 percent, with 19 percent disapproving, while Fox showed 84 percent approval and 16 percent disapproval. This is certainly down from the 90 percent and 92 percent levels a month into this second term, but the low 80s is not bad at all among your own party members. It is also worth noting that in this era of hyper-partisanship, we have the phenomenon of “negative partisanship,” which describes a behavior among many partisans who hate the other party and its leaders and candidates even more than they like their own. Operationally, that often means that even if a partisan is less than thrilled with their own side at any given point, their contempt for the other party is enough to prevent them from crossing over.
I confess to scratching my head when I hear Democrats wringing their hands about the challenge of motivating their base to vote this fall. That same CNN poll showed that 96 percent of Democrats planned to vote in November, versus 90 percent of Republicans. More importantly, 67 percent of Democrats said they were extremely motivated, compared to just 50 percent of Republicans. Indeed, one could say that the chair of the Democratic get-out-the-vote operation is Donald Trump himself.
According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter surveys—valuable because Pew checked with voting rolls to ensure that each respondent did in fact vote in these elections—in the 2022 midterm election, 98 percent of self-described Democrats voted for their party’s House candidates, versus 2 percent for the GOP candidate. In that election, Republicans voted 97 percent to 3 percent for their side’s candidates. Independents voted Democratic, 49 to 47 percent.
Four years earlier, in the 2018 midterm, Democrats voted 97 percent for their party’s House nominees; 2 percent voted for the Republicans. Among Republicans, the vote was 95 to 4 percent. In 2018, independents broke 55 to 40 percent for Democrats.
Even among those independents who concede that they lean toward one of the two major parties (and the vast majority do have those leanings), Democratic-inclined independents voted for that party’s candidate in 2022 by 91 to 6 percent. Independents who gravitate toward the GOP voted that way, 88 to 8 percent. In 2018, the numbers were quite similar; Democratic-leaning independents voted that way 91 to 6 percent, while GOP-leaning independents voted for their side 83 to 11 percent.
These numbers underscore that there are very few defections anymore in American politics as each party is more ideologically cohesive than it used to be; there are very few conservative Democrats, who might be first to defect on their side, just as there are no longer many liberal Republicans, who would be the first in the GOP to jump ship.
Keep in mind that a president with single-digit approval ratings among those in the opposite party and ratings in the 20s among independents does not have much more that he can lose outside of his own party. In short, Trump’s numbers dropping much further would depend on losing his own party members, something that is very rare these days. It also means that Republicans losing more than 25 or 30 House seats or more than a couple of Senate seats would require people voting for a Democrat who haven’t done so in a very long time.
Those who extrapolate a blue wave from generic congressional ballot polls showing big Democratic leads would do well to remember that in a sample of usually only a thousand voters, far fewer than a tenth of those polled will cast ballots in the three dozen or so House races and four or five Senate races that are most competitive and likely to be determinative. If 85 percent or so of those polled are essentially irrelevant to the outcome of an election, you haven’t learned much from that poll.