U.S. President Donald Trump praised results of a poll that suggested most Americans were happy with the state of the economy. But he failed to mention nearly half the respondents credit Barack Obama for the success.
Trump took to Twitter Thursday to boast about the results of a new Quinnipiac University poll, saying “66% of people feel the economy is ‘Excellent or Good.’”
“That is the highest number ever recorded by this poll,” the president tweeted.
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The poll was conducted between Jan. 5 and Jan. 9 and asked just over 1,100 voters how they would sum up the state of the economy.
According to the results, released Wednesday, 66 per cent of the respondents feel the U.S. economy is “excellent” or “good,” while another 33 per cent said the economy was “not so good” or “poor.” The university did note that it was the highest positive rating for the economy since Quinnipiac first began to poll Americans about the topic in 2001.
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However, the poll results show 49 per cent of voters said Obama was more responsible for the state of the economy compared to the 40 per cent who said Trump was more responsible.
“President Trump can hang his hat on the economy, but must share the hat rack with President Barack Obama, as two-thirds of the country see the economic picture as excellent or good,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.
Results from the poll also revealed that 37 per cent of voters feel Trump’s policies were helping the economy, compared to the 29 per cent that said his policies were hurting the economy. Another 30 per cent said his policies were not making much of a difference.
Quinnipiac also quizzed voters on whether they feel Trump was intelligent and fit for the Oval Office. While nearly 70 per cent of voters feel Trump is not “level headed,” 53 per cent feel the president is “intelligent” compared to the 44 per cent who said he’s not “intelligent” and the 28 per cent who said he’s “level headed.”
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The poll was conducted just after the release of Fire and Fury, the highly critical, tell-all book about Trump’s first year in office, which depicts a chaotic White House and has been roundly denounced by the Trump administration. Excerpts that were released earlier had caused a public rift between the president and his former chief strategist and top campaign aide, Steve Bannon, over Bannon’s comments in the book about Trump and his family. The book also questioned Trump’s fitness as president.
In a series of tweets a day after the book was released, Trump lashed out, saying “throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart” and later adding that he’s a “very stable genius.”
As for the Quinnipiac poll, 59 per cent of those surveyed disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Oval Office, while 36 per cent approve.
Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,106 voters nationwide with a margin of error of +/- 3.6 percentage points
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