There are a lot of stories circulating right now that suggest that Trump has seen a recent uptick in his polling numbers, and there are some polls out there that support that finding. I don’t pay much attention to minor fluctuation in polls, but I’ve gotten the impression that, overall, there has been very little movement during Trump’s presidency one way or the other. The things we think ought to hurt him don’t seem to have much effect, and the things that might reasonable be expected to help him don’t seem to do much for him. The Civiqs daily tracking poll confirms this.
It looks to me like the only events that have put a dent in Trump’s approval ratings have been related to the Russia investigation. The indictments of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn present the biggest spikes in disapproval. But even these events are barely discernible in the numbers. Charlottesville didn’t move the numbers. Even firing James Comey didn’t move the numbers. Accounting for the margin of error in the poll, you could argue that nothing that has happened after the first month or so of Trump’s presidency has had any impact whatsoever.
There has been more flux in other polls, to be sure, with Trump dropping down further in his approval before rebounding. But the overall sense I get is that we’re in a very stable political climate, at least as it relates to how well the president is perceived to be doing his job.
Having said that, it’s interesting to see that people are talking about Trump’s behavior with women again and we’re starting to see some polls show an improvement in his numbers. Everyone, and I mean everyone, thought Trump was finished when the Access Hollywood tapes came out followed by a phalanx of women credibly claiming to have be mistreated by him. It didn’t hurt him and may well have helped him.
There’s no doubt in my mind that women have been mobilized politically like never before. You can see it just by how many women are running for office. You can see it in the congressional preference and party identification numbers. But, somehow, this doesn’t seem to hurt the president’s approval numbers. If anything, he seems to get some benefit when the focus turns to women rather than the Russia investigation, taxes, or the other outrages of the day.
I can’t explain it.
I can’t explain it or understand it, either. But part of it is probably rooted in the nature of Republicans and their stubbornness to admit when they’re wrong.
But also this: Everything we see as a huge mistake is something they’re glad about. They got tax cuts, they see Trump moving forward on building a wall and promising to cut immigration numbers in half. His sexual history is either in the past or something they brag about. He hasn’t spoken out against gun violence and he hasn’t condemned the neo-nazi groups. And he didn’t speak up for the March for Life.
What’s not to like, if you’re a Republican? Trade tariffs and tough talk about the Middle East and North Korea, plus boosting the funds for the military…Really, he should be higher in the polls. Sickening, but probably true.
Couldn’t agree more. There isn’t a single Republican on the planet who cares if one of their fellow Republicans is a total pig. And, if what Trump is doing makes liberals mad – they like him all the more.
Not much else to it.
Was going to post the same with the addition that his numbers with Democrats and those who lean Democratic can hardly go any lower.
Wrong about what do you suppose? Who is really drilling it home?
My guess is that Campaign 2016 made clear to anyone paying attention that Trump was an deeply flawed cheat with not the slightest wisp of personal integrity. He presented himself as a mentally unbalanced narcissist who couldn’t possibly ever portray a traditional statesman. He ran as a human travesty, as far from being a national statesman as it was possible to be.
Now, if you are a member of The 46% who watched this scoundrel campaign in 2016 yet thought, “He’s the lesser of two evils!” or “Finally, someone who will hurt non-white people!” or “He’s a loathsome shit, but tax cuts!”, then you surely aren’t going to start caring about personal nuances like corruption or statesmanship or competence AFTER you have cast your vote for this manifest human failure. Der Trumper is simply “governing” precisely as the person who campaigned in 2016. Since he ran as a clown, and The 46% voted for a clown, they aren’t going to withhold their approval when they GOT a clown for prez. There’s no difference from what they saw and what they got: he was a turd then and he’s a turd now. There’s nowhere to fall!
Trumper is stable in the polls because he hasn’t deviated from being the terrible person voters saw in the campaign. You liked a scoundrel for a candidate, you’ll like a scoundrel for a prez. Any other stance is frankly unreasonable. Der Trumper’s polls therefore remains stable until the almost certain Gotterdammerung.
If we can believe the polls then there is a small portion of those 46% who are not such big fans anymore. Other than that I agree with 100% of everything you’ve said. It still leaves 60,000,000 ready to support him no matter what. Which I find extremely, extremely disturbing.
Thanks. I agree there’s got to have been some buyer’s remorse out there, but for the life of me I don’t know what such voters would base it on. What they saw was what they got.
Trump support is a signifier of other things, and until or unless voters’ attachment to those other things degrade, his numbers won’t move.
Many of those other things — misogyny, belligerent nationalism, white supremacy, Devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism — be are pretty reprehensible to me, nearly as much as the man himself, but clearly there’s not much more than a plurality who also feel that way.
Certainly seems there is some truth in that. So the question is then how can we help degrade or replace some of those signifiers? We had a good start after the Nazis in Charlottesville but seemed to let it go. So too with others you noted. Or is it hopeless?
It is not hopeless, Jonf….it simply is what it is. Those signifiers…misogyny, belligerent nationalism, white supremacy, Devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, etc…are symptoms of bone-deep stupidity. If history tells us anything, it is that you cannot eliminate “stupid” from the human genome. Round up every hater and eliminate them? First of all, you would necessarily become what you are fighting, and secondly the entire society would disintegrate. As Lenny Bruce once remarked on a similar topic, “But…but…who’ll clean the shithouse?”
50 or 60 years ago that was a valid question, but now we are at the edge of a robotic answer to that question, and also at the edge of a possible reactionary movement by the “stupids” who reside at the lower end of the economic and evolutionary ladder. Why are Trump’s polls so stable? Because..dumb as they are…these people are feeling the heat of the technological revolution in which we are becoming progressively enmeshed.
And…they are strong, prone to violence and well armed.
Plus…and it is very important to remember this…they are human beings. They are you and me and the rest of the people who are complaining about their existence and their stupidity, 2 or 4 or 20 or 100 generations ago. They are part of the living, ever-evolving tree of humanity, and when we mess with that system, we do so at our own peril. It’s kind of like saying “Oh…let’s get rid of all of the dirt and mess of root systems for our food, all of the blood and guts. Let’s clean that whole thing up, why don’t we? We’ll just take supplements, instead!!!” Have you ever noticed how unhealthy-looking, how pallid and slow-thinking the majority of people are who work at healthfood stores? I have, and I eat almost entirely organically. They rely on too many vitamins and not enough living food.
As above, so below.
Successful societies create systems that utilize the talents of all of their members. Some of those societies do so through the use of slavery and/or serfdom/rigid caste systems, but the most successful, dominant societies over the last several hundred years have evolved into places where talents and work are rewarded sufficiently to create livable lives for most of their members.
Including the stupid.
The hard, generational trek up the class ladder is evidence of evolution at work, and the more our system includes all of its citizens equally in terms of possibilities, the better it will become. Use what talents people possess. Sure, reward the brilliant, but make life palatable for the ditchdigger as well.
The U.S. has failed to keep up with much of the rest of the developing world in this matter, and it is finally reaping the whirlwind created by its greed and folly. All you need to know on that account is our world-leading percentage of prison residents.
We are not taking care of “the stupids,” and when they get mad, they steal and kill. End of story. All races, all sexes. That’s the way it works.
How best to do this?
Keep on humping along, I guess. Distrust so-called leaders…no what matter their supposed politics may be…if they take huge money from corporate entities that are dedicated to the bottom line even if that means sending jobs from our “stupids” to others elsewhere that are paid a fraction of what U.S. workers are paid.
Or used to be paid, anyway. Ross Perot pinned it 25+ years ago.
From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates:
It took a little longer than he thought it would take and the revolt of the “stupids” ended up with Trump in the White House, but here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
The best bet for the 2020 presidential election if we do not wake the fuck up?
A Republican centrist vs. a Democratic centrist…and by “centrist” I mean someone who takes money from those corporate interests that have…in pursuit of the bottom line…fulfilled Perot’s prediction.
Welcome to the wreckage of the good ship “S.S. United States.”
As Perot also said:
Trump isn’t going to do it, despite his populist, nationalist spiel. All he really wants is power and profit for himself and the new gang that he represents. And the mainstream Republicans aren’t going to do it, for sure!!!
That leaves the Dems.
Who are controlled by the corporate-funded DNC establishment.
The prospects don’t look too good right about now, do they.
So it goes.
But we do keep trying.
Don’t we.
Don’t we?
Please!!!
Later…
AG
What’s the mystery? I felt like this the day of the election in 2016, but I’ve taken on-board the obvious truth that I was ignorant of the depravity of something just under half of us.
We would all like to think everyone’s nice, etc., but after last election day, I don’t see it that way. A lot of Americans are simply bellicose, angry and sadistic.
Consider our long history and it’s maybe not such a mystery. We took the whole continent at gunpoint and then occupied it for a couple of hundred years, thanks to guns.
There is also Fox News and the hate radio that many are immersed in.
At a restaurant, we overheard every GOP talking point and conspiracy that exists from two guys at an adjoining table. They consider all news sources worldwide to be biased, except for Fox of course.
They even agreed that Google was left wing propaganda.
You can’t talk to these people.
This! It’s the brainwashing that FOX uses to keep its followers coming back every day. It’s always breathless, Can You Believe What the Left is Doing?! constant stream of hyped-up nonsense. It’s replaying over and over the memes and talking points until viewers simply parrot what they’ve heard.
I don’t know how we fight this. I think a lot of the older FOX devotees will die of old age, but in the meantime, how do you get people to walk away from the propaganda?
Yes. Certainly the case in Ky where I live … LOT of Trump voters here, and they lap up Fixed News like it’s cream … they are astonished if you confront them with ANY fact regarding the Orange One. They literally don’t have any critical reasoning faculties left.
Could it be they are astonished since few if anyone tells them that? They are insulated from the world and the world is not exactly banging down the door.
It’s a culture that completely ignores the MSM NYT WashPo MSNBC etc. The better informed get all their information from FOX NC, Daily Caller, Drudge and the rest of the Conservative Infotainment Complex. The lesser informed get the same information from their friends filtered through Facebook and Twitter.
You can not talk to these people, they will not listen.
Could be due to a combination of the near normalization of the unprecedented and continuous waves of insanity to which we have all become inured, and the complete and utter sealing of the right-wing information air-lock which has finally taken place in Trump world.
The lines have pretty solidly stratified, and there is probably only one thing now which will effect the larger scheme of things and the composition of the political landscape, and that is election results. The Trump cake has been baked, and you’re either satisified with the result, or you are not. If you are, little else matters. Your cognitive dissonance takes care of everything for you. And if you don’t like the result, well, nothing he does will change your feeling. You will hate him forever, largely for the coarseness and embracing of hate that he has helped rain down on our country.
The approval polls are now pretty much just fanciful mind exercises for the enthusiasts of the hypothetical political scenario.
Strongman Trump will continue garnering, at a minimum, about 35% of the population who are right-wing authoritarians. A fluctuation of a few points above that is almost all composed of people who have a small amount of integrity who don’t really pay attention to politics, but believe, wholeheartedly, that BothSidesDoItTM.
It best to look at a poll average, since that allows you to aggregate over far more data than just a single poll. If you look at the 538 average, it seems pretty clear that there have been 3 phases:
(1) Trump starts out low (low 40s), and goes downward, with the biggest hit after the Comey firing in May.
(2) Trump stays in the mid-high 30s until mid December, when Rs pass the tax cut.
(3) He starts going up a bit, to stabilize again in the low 40s.
The poll numbers strongly suggest that Trump did get an advantage by passing the tax cut. Most likely by bringing some wavering Rs home. The congressional ballot also tightened a bit at that point.
The tax cut was actually pretty clever on the Rs end. As public policy, it is absolutely terrible. But in political terms, the fact that they did something (rather than nothing), and the economy remains great, allows them to plausibly claim credit for the good economy in 2018.
With regards to Stormy, etc…none of that kind of stuff is going to matter. 58% of the population has already concluded that Trump is a scoundrel, and the remainder had decided that whatever liberal outrage they hear about on Fox News is more important than something they already made a decision to ignore when they voted for Trump.
Exactly, you can’t discount the power of an economy that is continuing to do okay.
After today’s market rout I heard the first whisper of recession on the horizon.
The couple of times I’ve seen the crosstabs, Republicans remain for Trump in absolute numbers, but a lot have dropped from strongly to somewhat in favor. The numbers don’t seem to move, but they’ve grown shakier.
The 35 to 30 % base will never desert him, for all the reasons in these comments. But he loses 10 to 15 points if the economy sours.
It’s also possible that fewer people identify as Republicans, although I haven’t seen this discussed very much.
“Fewer people identify as Republicans?” A pleasant thought, but I fear not. Not in any effective numbers, anyway. As I point out below in the comment beginning “Booman asks,”
It is the “dark matter” citizens who are reachable…the ones who have become disgusted with both parties and their candidates, at least since the end of Obama’s term in office if not well before.
These are the ones who were alienated by Clinton I’s economic policies and sexual obsessions, by Bush II’s stupidity plus his reliance on corporate criminals like Dick Cheney and also by the Democratic Party’s failure to even try to fight the vote fraud that got him elected twice, by Obama’s many-faced Peace President/PermaWar President/Wall Street President/Security State President act and then finally totally turned off by the choice offered in the most recent election…a Klown Chump King or a politically manipulative, gaffe-ridden, cold-hearted hustler who would have without a doubt continued the mistakes of both the Clinton I and Obama (
p)residencies.In point of fact, I believe that HRC pretty much ran Bill Clinton during his terms in office, beginning with his governorship of Arkansas. The only things she couldn’t control were his sexual proclivities. She was his very own Dick Cheney, and he was her Bush I.
Her good-looking, charming frontman.
Nice.
The only problem was that he turned out to be a little bit too charming.
So it goes.
AG
P.S. From Wikipedia.
Hmmmm…
Sound familiar?
As the Sufis say, “As above, so below.”
Bet on it.
Thinking about everyone I’m even casually acquainted with, I can’t think of anyone who has changed their core political views in the last 20 years.
The problem with polls – all of them – is that they’re so bad at measuring turnout, and turnout is pretty much the whole ballgame.
My reason for optimism is that younger people seemed to finally be getting pissed off enough to vote. Also women, but there was much less upside since women have been beating out men in turnout for a long time. I can’t tell you how many 20-30 year olds I talk to who don’t vote and don’t care. They’re lefties without even realizing it – on every issue – they’re just so cynical that they can’t be bothered to show up on election tuesday. The Parkland thing might be moving the needle on this.
Usual non-voters turned out in 2006 and presidential years have been enough (save 2004) to push the dem over the top, but we’re really in a bad place after the census year tragedy of 2010, which I blame on dems like DiFi who allowed Lieberman to win and single handedly kill medicare for all, giving us obamacare, giving us 2010.
Typical 20-30 year old that I talk to:
Somebody ought to make that a daily bitch.
Doesn’t help when Democrats actively fight Warren-Sanders type policies like the group of heroes on that recent banking biil.
Yep.who speaks for the democrats?
Trump’s support is not broad but it is deep.
I think one thing that’s not be recognized is that McCain and Romney were not fully embraced as real conservatives by the base. The base is all in on Trump because they genuinely `like’ him in a their own despicable way and they won’t move away without a truly cataclysmic event.
There doesn’t seem to be any democrat trying to knock him off his pedestal. There is that. Who would that be anyway? Biden?
He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.
That works.
Because extramarital affairs have a pretty limited effect on how you govern especially once they come out. That’s the rational and democrats and republicans have switched on the view of this since the 90s (source: 538) because partisanship.
Myself I feel the same way I did back then.
You’re asking why Trump voters won’t admit they got it wrong. Not. going. to. happen.
I have started thinking that we may have placed far too much hope in the Russian investigation. And as a consequence Trump and friends have had too much space to run. Trump and his propaganda machine are always chiding us with fake news about Russia. Eventually people come to believe it. And it starts to look like that. Do we really think there will be a wave democratic election this year or are we headed to a disappointing brick wall? I become more depressed each day. I doubt Stormy Daniels et. al. will take him down.
I think it is all so predictable and quite easy to explain. As women protest and/or gain more power, Republicans will be boosted by any reminder of how Trump used and discarded these women – i.e. dominated them! To them, these women are grovelling victims – and that’s just how they like ’em. It is perceived as a punch back at the trend, a reminder that big daddys’ still rule. More than an FU to Libs, it’s an FU to all women, even their own. And in the case of some conservative women (my mother is one) it’s an FU to themselves – this last one, I cant explain.
“…a punch back at the trend….” nails it, and that trend was on full display last Saturday in Washington in the diversity of the presenters and the passion of their speeches. Emma Gonzalez pretty much sums it up all by herself.
Social and economic justice. Diversity and inclusion. The new America.
Booman asks:
Try this as an explanation, Booman.
The polls are fixed.
That is…they fix themselves, to a large degree.
How?
Why?
Like this:
People who do not “believe” in any readily available side of this question?
People who think that all three “sides” of it are as rotten as hell?
They don’t answer the polls.
They do not make themselves available to the polls.
Result?
Sure.
Fairly stagnant poll results.
Left, right or center, the poll respondents belong more to the Idiocracy Party than they do to any other firmament of belief.
Thus a virtual logjam of poll results.
Gridlocked polls.
The same people, believing in the same several things.
Meanwhile?
Back at the ranch?
The cattle have broken down the corral and threaten to stampede all over the ranch house, while the rustlers breathlessly await around the bend.
America, 2018.
Deal wid it.
Your party was part of the problem.
It remains part of the problem.
Deal wid it.
If of course you can.
AG
I think a possible explanation lies in the word, “deplorable.” Deplorable? Does that work for you? Maybe not the best timed moment in political history, but not wrong in the essential analysis.
First, as you point out, Trump could hardly go any lower with Democrats, including left-leaning Indies than he already has. So, virtually his entire base of support comes from a) the extremist hard core base and b) the typical middle manager, suburban GOP voter. But, I would wager that this second bloc of voters is very soft.
One of the reasons his approval/disapproval ratings haven’t shifted much is the reason you have given on more than one occasion: nothing significantly crisis-related that he has profoundly blown has yet happened.
Yes, he mishandled the disasters but Congress through a pile of money at TX and FL and it all went away. And the GOP doesn’t care about Puerto Rico, of course.
What happens when the economy starts coming apart or if he and Bolton attack Iran (or DPRK)? He assumes that all of the GOP (as opposed to the extremists) will be happy to wage yet another land war in Asia. I really doubt it.
The Democrats this summer and especially into the Fall need to start drawing some dramatic lines in the sand. And it is at least conceivable that major WH figures (looking at Jared) will be indicted by then.
We’ll see. It’s a bit like the “Fake War” period between the fall of Poland in 1939 and the Fall of France in 1940.
These polls are essentially meaningless. In effect they are asking: “Are you a Republican?”
What this tells me is that the matrix of targeted propaganda and misinformation that put him in office (meaning, the combination of FOX News material and Russian machinations) is an ongoing, stable force.
Otherwise people would realize that they’d been sold a bill of goods; there’d be “buyer’s remorse,” plummeting poll numbers etc.
That’s what happened with Carter and Clinton — an immediate “disillusionment” that, I now think more than ever, was about the press swerving away from its pro-democrat “horse-race” election coverage (which is always about the excitement of coronating a “winner” in an abstract as well as a literal sense, like the Oscars or the Super Bowl) and returning to its rest state of anti-liberal bias.
Trump’s stability — the frozen snapshot from his election — just tells me that all those tactical mechanisms from Cambridge Analytica and Ailes and etc. are still in place, and still smoothly humming along. The Trump supporters are as isolated from reality as is possible in the modern world (and will stay that way until they face economic or military catastrophe, but that takes a while, as it did with Bush).
Great comment.
The Republicans initiated a long term campaign decades ago with Reagan (or even earlier post-FDR) to incite and nourish anti-government, anti-social equality, anti-tax themes,etc. ad nauseum. Technology (plus the Russians) has enabled them to refine it and increase its impact.
Talk radio. FOX. Social media. All of it has become a stable part of our public life. And thus the opinions of those who are influenced by it have also become a stable part of our society.
VERY much agree.
I’d add Obama to your list as well.
The press quickly pivoted for “What a Historic Moment!” to dubbing every first year road bump as “Obama’s Katrina.” They filled the airwaves with right wing hitmen. I was reminded recently of how once the banks were stable again, a bunch of Economic Hacks (many directly responsible for the crash) got hours of airtime to claim America was Founded on Debtors Paying Their Debits! As a result Republicans got enough spine to block mortgage relief efforts.
The media completely lied about who and what the Tea Party was until AFTER the 2010 midterms had been certified.And that is just a few examples from the first two years.
Never mind, that by 2014, cable news had been purged of all by a few progressive voices and replaced with Republican political operatives posing a pundits and even reporters.
Maybe because life really hasn’t changed significantly for citizens since he took office. The economy is stable. Pretty much everything DT has tried to do has run into roadblocks in the courts. He’s so incompetent that he can’t really make an impact on people’s daily lives. Now if he starts going after people’s health care again, his polling numbers might dip again.
Another event that may have had an impact was the White House physician’s report that “the president earned perfect marks on a cognitive test – that he himself had requested”.
I can just hear 60,000,000 sighs of relief – “See! We knew he wasn’t crazy; and neither are we!”.
The examination of cognitive ability having nothing to do with diagnosing a personality disorder was lost in the euphoria.
So now that physician is the new VA Secretary.
I’m sure it’s a coincidence.
.