Trump should worry about his disapproval rating

BloombergOpinion Early Returns

Jonathan Bernstein

Time for a check-in on President Donald Trump's approval rating, and what it says about his reelection prospects. Trump remains unpopular. The FiveThirtyEight poll tracker estimates he's at 42.3% approval and 52.2% disapproval. The historical comparison is as bad as ever: Of the 11 polling-era presidents through 929 days in office (Gerald Ford didn't serve this long), he's second-worst, beating only Jimmy Carter – and his disapproval just dropped behind Carter's once again, making him dead last on that score. It's theoretically possible that an incumbent with a 42% approval rating could be reelected. Perhaps the electorate will be disproportionately drawn from those who like Trump. Perhaps there's a polling error in his favor. Maybe an unusually high number of people who think he's doing a bad job will vote for him anyway. After all, lots of voters picked Trump in 2016 even though they didn't like him. And maybe he gets lucky again with the Electoral College. That's a lot of maybes, though, and none of them are guaranteed to help Trump. In fact, some of them could easily leave him doing worse than his polling suggests. Remember, too, that it's August 2019 and not October 2020. Trump is actually only a bit behind where Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were at the equivalent points in their first terms. By Election Day, Obama had rebounded to about 50% and Reagan was above 55%. It can work in the other direction as well: In August 1991, George H.W. Bush was still at nearly 70% approval after the Gulf War until a recession brought him low. Or both ways! Carter at this point went from 30% up to 55% long enough to win re-nomination, and then all the way back down. In other words, there's plenty of time for the president to improve – or to collapse further. What's harder to know is whether opinion is unusually rigid for this president. Trump has spent his presidency in an abnormally narrow range of public opinion, especially since May 2018. It seems possible that he could revisit his 2017 lows, when he fell to around 37%. Since his brief (and unimpressive) honeymoon, his peak has been 43.1% approval. Could that be close to a hard cap? There's no way to know. But it's difficult to imagine what events could significantly boost his popularity at this point. If I were in the Trump campaign, what would really worry me are the president's persistently high disapproval scores. Again, since that brief honeymoon, his disapproval rating has been above 50% throughout his term. In fact, he's spent about as much time over 50% – after just two and a half years – as all of the other 11 polling-era presidents did in their first four years combined. There's simply no record of any president with those figures recovering. And remember: It's one thing to dislike a politician, but it's another to think he's doing a poor job as president – and the latter is usually a good predictor of vote choice. In short, it seems possible that more than half the nation has already reached a tentative conclusion against Trump. And if they have, it's not at all clear what he could do to win many of them back. 1. Rachel Bitecofer projects the 18 strongest House targets for Democrats.  2. Rebecca Traister on Professor Elizabeth Warren. 3. Perry Bacon Jr. on Republicans and guns. 4. Alex Seitz-Wald on Democrats and 2020 state legislative elections. 5. And David Jarman has a great item giving names (or at least locations) to U.S. House districts. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.

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