The trend isn’t a good one for Donald Trump. Whether it’s an individual poll, or an average of all the reputable research, the president’s approval rating is abysmal and it has been trending downward since the day he took office.
At the same time, the gap between those who approve and disapprove of Trump is growing wider as the young administration struggles in its early days.
The latest poll by Quinnipiac University shows Trump’s approval rating is now just 33 per cent, with 61 per cent saying they disapprove. Gallup, the long-running standard for tracking presidential job approval, shows Trump at 36 per cent – down nine points since the day he took office. Even Rasmussen, sometimes criticized for delivering results that skew Republican, shows the president with just 38 per cent approval, with disapproval numbers as high as everyone else.
There’s no escaping this simple fact: no president has ever polled this poorly, this early in their administration. Worse yet for Trump, there’s no sign his approval rating has found the floor.
But the topline numbers are not actually the most problematic part of the news for the president.
Quinnipiac’s survey found that while 76 per cent of Republicans still approve of Trump, 50 per cent of white voters with no college degree disapprove of the job he’s doing. That’s a key Trump constituency that is trending in the wrong direction.
Break it down to look at Trump’s character traits and there are some more astonishing numbers:
- 71 per cent say Trump is not level-headed
- 54 per cent say they’re embarrassed, rather than proud, to have Trump as president
- 57 per cent say Trump is abusing the powers of his office
- 62 per cent say Trump is not honest
- 59 per cent say the president does not care about average Americans
Neither the cloud of the Russia investigation, nor the storm of contradictions from the White House about meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian contacts has helped matters.
Quinnipiac found that 58 per cent of respondents believe the president “has attempted to derail or obstruct the investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
In this numbers game, Trump has done little to help himself.
The president’s frequent, and sometimes problematic tweets, have 69 per cent of American voters saying it’s time for the Trump to stop tweeting from his personal account – that’s the highest that number has been to date.
With mid-term elections next year, one has to wonder how long congressional Republicans will continue to hitch their wagon to a president this unpopular.
(Author’s note: Some will be quick to dismiss polling as irrelevant in light of Trump’s against-the-odds election win, but remember these are the same polling firms that quite accurately predicted the final vote percentages, with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by a few points. In the U.S., national polling doesn’t capture the state-by-state intricacies of the electoral college, which Donald Trump won handily.)
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