There is evidence in the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll that the bloom is off Trump’s rose with a lot of rural voters. On a host of issues, folks are expressing much less confidence in the president. In some areas, like his handling of health care, the environment, and corruption, he’s actually in negative territory now among voters in small towns and rural communities. On some subjects where he is still getting modestly positive numbers, the fall from the winter and spring has nonetheless been precipitous.
For example, his net approval is down seventeen points on immigration, sixteen points on his dealings with Congress, thirteen points on uniting the country, and twelve points on employment and jobs. He’s seen a ten percent drop on his handling of the economy and foreign policy. He’s seen the least slippage on international trade, but he’s still lost a net of eight points on that issue.
It can be tricky to interpret these numbers. In some cases, people are unhappy that he hasn’t delivered on his promises, but in others they seem dismayed as what they perceive as broken promises or reversals of policy. Health care is a good example. Some are dismayed that he hasn’t repealed the Affordable Care Act while others are upset about the proposals Congress put forth that the president supported. On immigration, some feel like he hasn’t gone far enough or are angry that he hasn’t produced, while others think he sold out to the Democrats to get a deal on hurricane relief and the debt ceiling.
With so much push and pull, it’s even hard to understand his hemorrhaging on the environment. Is he upsetting rural voters with his extremism or is he annoying them with his inability to recreate lost energy jobs? As with most of the other issues on the list, the truth is probably that Trump is losing support in both directions.
Another way to interpret the numbers is that people just feel worse about the president in general, and this is leading them to give him poorer marks across the board. In other words, it would be a mistake to put to much emphasis on any single issue and it’s probably better to just take away a more general sense of unhappiness.
The president and his team are most likely struggling to interpret these numbers, too. You can use them to argue in a variety of directions. You can say that failure to deliver on health care, immigration and taxes is killing him, or you can say that he’s losing support because he’s broken promises on protecting entitlements and people’s access to health care. You can say that people are angry that he hasn’t built his wall on the Mexican border or you can argue that his inability to work with Congress or unite the country is turning people off.
The only thing that’s really clear is that all his numbers are down substantially in his areas of electoral strength. The four areas where he still has fairly strong net approval are on the economy and job and trade, and on his dealing with ISIS. This suggests that the biggest risk to the president is a downturn in the economy. And that’s why the September jobs report has to be a concern for the White House. It was the first monthly job decline in seven years, and if it is more than a blip caused by the hurricanes, the president could see a lot more slippage in support among his base.
If you look at the “overall” row in the table, it seems clear that there was a big 14 point drop between April 16-May 13 polling and May 14-June 10 polling. The numbers were only mildly slipping before that and have remained basically stable since.
What happened around mid-May? The obvious thing that comes to mind is the Comey firing. Is it possible that a significant chunk of rural voters were bothered by this? Or is there some other explanation that I’m missing?
538 looked at it recently and in the eastern midwest Trump is holding strong. The largest drops were in Red states where Trump could lose substantial support and still win.
How recently? I saw them look at polling of rural areas to find what you say, but it was prior to the release of these polls.
Yeah, it was prior to this. I haven’t looked at the details yet but I think it’s always always warranted to be cautious about beliefs like this even with polls.
Trump’s base wants 5 or 6 impossible things before breakfast. Take immigration for instance.
Do they really expect to force 11 million people out of the country? That’s never going to happen. But, Trump has cracked down on black and brown people, and is constantly trolling his enemies on racist points. So, they should be happy there. Plus he can build a small section of wall using discretionary funds. Mexico won’t pay for it, and it won’t cover the entire border, but he can blame Congress for that.
In fact, Trumps’ covering his ass with his base by blaming Congress for every failure is far more likely to destroy their faith in their party and make them unlikely to vote for GOP “establishment” candidates in 2018. Trump cooperates with this because he wants to destroy the traditional GOP and replace it with fascist shock troops loyal only to him.
But, this sets the table for massive losses in 2018 since Trump is convincing his base voters that their own party is betraying them.
We saw the result of such behaviour with Bernie Sanders in 2016. He managed to convince millions of people that Hillary Clinton was particularly corrupt, thus the left and right-wing basically agreed that Hillary was a corporate whore who couldn’t be trusted. The right wing had other reasons for not voting for her, but the left wing of the Democratic party certainly validated that view and gave tremendous support for it. This does not mean we can’t criticize politicians for fear of enabling a right wing critique of them.
But, the dynamic is clear. Trump is saying bluntly to the GOP base that their elected leaders are corrupt and worthless, and that is why Congress failed to enact any of Trump’s agenda.
This shifts blame away from Trump and onto the backs of “low energy” Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. But, it also makes it less likely that GOP voters will bother to vote at all. Trump will not be on the ballot, but Congress will be. But, will GOP voters grit their teeth and show up and vote for “traitors” and “weaklings” who have thwarted Trump’s agenda?
Some will, but a lot won’t and elections are won and lost at the margins.
Good! I’m glad to hear it. It couldn’t happen to a more awful person in the whole wide world.
It’s actually very simple. Rural Americans hate losers.
do they hate losers as much as they hate liberals? I know which way I’d bet.
That’s the $64,000 question, really. They hate him now, but when it comes time to vote again, will they vote D, lay out, or suck it up and vote for him anyway?
I have no earthly idea. But for now it’s at least good news that whatever political capital he still has is eroding steadily.
I cringe every time I see that some new poll numbers are going to come out which ask about Presidential approval. For one thing, you can certainly count on the media to report them like they are reading them through those goggles that distort everything to simulate driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The urge to report them like they are first half stats of a football game is just too much for them to resist. The stupidity just fries my synapses.
But it is doubly maddening to see Democrats and liberals interpreting it like it is some roundhouse national condemnation of Trump’s policies and actions. Because, by and large, it most certainly is not. There might likely be more people who are upset because he hasn’t been insane enough to satisfy them, rather than the fact that people don’t actually like what he is doing.
I don’t think things have really moved all that far from where they were on election day. Sure, there have been few small cracks in the facade of a small number of “old guard” Republicans. But none of these, when examined closely, can be called real profiles in courage. For the most part, everyone who voted for him would do it again, if they had the chance. And those of us who loathed him election day have only hardened our stance even more, as we have careened toward a potential nuclear holocaust, see continued dismantlement of the social safety net, see long term alliances fractured, and watch as all constraints are being removed from protecting the environment.
However, it is hard to dispute that there are some severe dangers lurking for this administration. There are a lot of subsurface issues which could easily destroy the Trump presidency. These are probably the only things which will motivate Republicans to entertain the idea of turning on Donald Trump. I don’t think, from a policy standpoint, that there is anything he can do that will cause them to walk away from him. The political price is just too high for them. There is not enough cover for them to desert the ship, even if it is taking on water and in danger of sinking at some point.
I’m inclined to agree that these poll results can be overread, especially more than a year in advance of the next national election. That said, we should also bear in mind the research suggesting an important connection between the attitude of at least some voters toward the president and their willingness to vote for candidates of the president’s party. Increasing unhappiness about Trump could have a noticeable effect in November 2018, especially in combination with the divisiveness within the Republican Party now being encouraged by all kinds of actors.
Agreed. They voted for a benevolent dictator, not a President, who ran a High School Class President Campaign of Free Ice Cream and NO Homework! Trump spoke to voters who believe our problems just need simple common sense solutions and our social/government institutions make most of the problem.
So of course there was going to be disappointment.
These voters will come home to him in 2020 no matter what happens barring a domestic economic meltdown. However every other elected Republican may not be so likely. It was the Republican congress that paid for Bush’s Iraq war in 2006. It wasn’t until the economy was in full melt down that the W bumper stickers and Bush/Cheney04 lawn signs started disappearing where I lived at the time.
Observers talk about “donor fatigue” to refer to the erosion of giving from the public when they are confronted with disaster after disaster in a relatively short time frame. It’s possible that rural America and conservatives, in general may get “outrage fatigue”, over time, i.e. becoming increasingly inured to Trump’s repeated domestic and international outrages, provocations of liberals and minorities and all-around boastful bullying. To the extent that, in the absence of real accomplishments from Trump or the GOP Congress, they may become increasingly apathetic or tuned out of the political process altogether. Not all of them, of course, and probably not a majority but a substantial proportion might be tuning out.
Polling is premature. We are still less than a year removed from Trump’s election and he has racked up zero victories and taken a significant number of losses. The GOP is in the middle of a civil war attacking themselves. This is portrayed as some kind of strength, that the GOP has been portrayed for years as falling apart, yet goes from strength to strength, but it clearly isn’t.
A political party depends not only on it’s most enthusiastic base supporters but also on the professional members of that party. The party workers at the state and local level, the Congressmen from that party, the media stable of political pundits, etc.
Only among Republicans these people are at each other’s throats in the way that Democrats turned on Debbie Wasserman Shultz.
Simply compare how Trump would behave if he really wanted to cement himself in power with how he is actually behaving. He is actively alienating the entire Federal Bureaucracy, particularly the FBI.
The last president to do that was Richard Nixon, and we all know what happened to him. When you are a career financial criminal who has always gotten away with things because he has a lot of money and is a king-hell self-promoter. Only that kind of talent doesn’t help much with the Special Prosecutor’s Grand Jury.
The worst is the cherry picking of Gallup which is noisy as hell
Trump’s favorables were 38 in the exit poll. For months his job approval numbers have been about that.
He is unpopular. He always has been with the exception of a month or two after he took office
What is remarkable is how stable his numbers are
The idea that anyone is giving him “approval” on “the economy” just indicates how ignorant and removed from reality all this poll data really is.
All that means is that the Dow keeps going up, or at least isn’t going down significantly. Also, too, that gas prices haven’t gone up significantly either.
I would be more concerned about the Shiller index. Black Monday is in the rear-view. The only time that the index has trended higher was during the (original) dot com bubble.
http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/
Trump knows his hold on the base is slipping, which is why he’s flogging the hell out of the NFL/kneeling issue. That stunt he and Pence pulled at the Colts game was really ridiculous, and yet, it will keep the base wallowing in hate and at bay for a while. But eventually, even they will have no choice but to come to the realization that Trump hasn’t done anything for them, other than satiate their fears and hatred. Sure, there’s still a hardcore wall of stupid that will be with him no matter what, but what he does to keep them narrows his support beyond the base instead of broadening it.
2018 is still a long way off but I believe Trump and the GOP are heading for an inevitable reckoning.
This is nonsense. Trump was about 47 47 in the month after he took office in Reuters. He is now at about 37-58.
The decline in rural areas is arguable LESS than it is overall.
Of course you actually have to bother looking at the data to understand this which very few ever do.
And yet I see story after story based on bad analysis.
how about comments based on bad analysis?
I never said Trump’s numbers were going up, down or sideways in any place but rural communities and small towns. This is a tracking poll. I’m discussing a subset of the numbers. I’m comparing his initial numbers in the poll to his numbers now.
There are distinctions in the size of the fall, based on the issues. It isn’t just a honeymoon drop.
It is really useful to try to figure out why this is happening. Even if the results seem like pairs of opposites eg
It may be that this narcissist set himself up for this and the only thing we have to do is not interrupt him too much while he makes mistakes. He actually did run on a platform of free ice cream and no homework as someone said so everything is downhill from that BS.
Polls mean nothing.
They are crooked at worst, inaccurate at best and are now primarily simply more false news used to spook the rubes. The fact that people are still frothing at the mouth over conflicting poll results after the pollsters’ (and poll-dependent pundits’) utter failure in the 2015/2016 first post-dominance-of-social-media U.S.election amazes me.
Basing calculations on information that has been proven to be inaccurate?
As the coders say, “GIGO.”
Get another hobby.
Please.
And now the news:
Later…
AG
Like most low information voters, Trumpalos subscribe to the Underpants Gnome school of democracy: Vote Trump + ? = MAGA. Each one’s “?” is slightly different from the next, be it “tougher on immigration” or “put Americans to work” or “fuck the Jews,” or whatever. It’s not even clear to the Trumpalo. In fact, most of them probably couldn’t tell you what their “?” actually was. But it made sense once.
And now I doubt most could articulate the source of their unease. But most know it isn’t working, that this guy wasn’t what they thought he was, or could be, and they really wish this would just stop.
Many will return to being non-voters by 2018.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that most Presidents suffer a precipitous decline in their approval ratings in the first year in office as the ‘audacity of hope’ meets the cold reality of what they can actually do in office.
Insofar as Trump is an outlier, it is because his approval ratings were never very high in the first place, but he had a very motivated base which got him over the line. They are unlikely to be as motivated to vote for a congress critter they have barely ever heard of and who has been part of a congress loathed by almost everybody.
The other area where Trump seems to be something of an outlier is that his base is overwhelmingly made up of less educated authoritarian types who can’t understand the complexities of government and who wonder why Trump doesn’t do what he said he would do by executive order or whatever. The line that it is congress which is frustrating him will do incumbent Republican congressmen and senators no favours whatsoever.
Throwing them some red meat in the form of criticisms of NFL players is a useful distraction strategy because hating on others is a core part of his appeal. But the bottom line will be how the economy is doing in 2018, and particularly, how his supporters feel they are doing within it.
I have no doubt Trump will try to dial up the racism to white fever around the midterms in an attempt to get his base out again. Expect high profile expulsion of some immigrants and the killing of minorities engaged in protests. Perhaps a war in Korea… Emotional gratification is what it is all about for his base, not complex policy changes. Some symbolic victories – like parts of the wall being built – might be all that it will take to re-consolidate his base.
Opinion polls at this stage are little more than weather vanes. It’s what happens in the last few weeks and days of the election campaign which will determine the turnout and dominant sentiment. And the more extreme the fear or euphoria the better for Trump. The Nazis knew that well.
I am thinking (ie guessing) that this is mostly right … the NFL/flag stuff being a tried-and-true strategy. The appeal to Stars and Stripes/National Anthem is not about hate – imho. It’s a real basic American unity ritual. Trump is wrapping himself in the flag as people used to say.
It’s too bad that can’t be neutralized. It’s not good to let him get away with that especially since he went to some trouble to wrap himself in the Confederate flag – it doesn’t seem right he gets to have both.
The one, and only, thing that must be understood about Trump’s people is that they want nothing for themselves. They only want to harm others.
This was true in 1980, when they were Reagan’s people, and it is neither less nor more true today.
The rural base is worried about their labor force. The dairy business in Cal, NY, WI, Iowa, PA, race horses in Kentucky, and every crop produced in Fl is dependent upon undocumented workers. They see another broken promise…the donald was suppose to get rid of the bad Mexicans not the good ones. I see the fires in Cal and wonder if the undocumented have not showed up to volunteer.