| Time to check in on Donald Trump's approval ratings. Since I last looked a month ago, there's a bit of good news for him. Maybe. Possibly. But not enough. The good news? A month ago, Trump's net approval (that is, approval minus disapproval) was a dismal negative 15.2. That put him just a bit better than Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were in early July of their election years before they were each solidly defeated. All the elected presidents who were re-elected were doing either somewhat or a lot better. As I look at it now (according to the polling average estimate at FiveThirtyEight), it's not quite that bad; Trump's approval is slightly up from 40.7% in early July to 41.3% now, and his net approval is only a slightly-less-dismal 13.5 points underwater. He's gained ground on both Carter and Bush, who slumped during this point of their re-election years. If the improvement is real and Trump builds on it, he'll have a chance of winning in November. Unfortunately for Trump, it's not at all clear that it's real — or that he has room to grow. The improvement has coincided with a period in which there have been hardly any top-quality polls released. Since Fox News and ABC News/Washington Post, both of which have highly regarded polling operations, released surveys taken over July 12–15, there's been hardly anything we can put too much trust in. FiveThirtyEight assigns letter grades to polling shops, and of the dozens of surveys taken since mid-July only two came from A-range pollsters. Of course, unreliable polls could be wrong in either direction. But Trump's approval stood at right around 40% in mid-July, and it won't be at all clear that the improvement since then is real until the next round of top-rated evidence shows up. If the improvement is real, it does suggest that perhaps theories that Trump has a high "floor" are correct — that is, no matter what happens, close to 40% of the population will stick with him. I'm still very skeptical, but it's been a good month for that theory. However, the flip side is that Trump's support may have a low ceiling as well. His disapproval is at 54.7% and it's rarely gone below about 52%, which suggests that a majority of the nation may have permanently turned against him. I'm not sure that either the high floor or the low ceiling are real, but I do see more evidence of the latter. And at any rate, whether he can in principle win back those who currently disapprove of how he's handling his job or not, he needs to win them over in fact and to do so quickly. Absentee and in-person early voting will begin soon, and election day is not far off at all. The conventions, such as they are this year, will take place during the latter half of August. I'll still keep my eye on Trump's approval ratings after that, but once we hit September I'll start taking head-to-head horse-race polls a lot more seriously. So far, those look bad for Trump too, although the national head-to-heads have the same lack of recent quality polls that the approval-ratings surveys suffer from. Overall, I'm pretty much where I was a month ago: Something significant has to change for Trump to have a good chance of winning, and it's hard to see what that something might be. But if you're looking for evidence in Trump's favor, at the very least he doesn't seem to have lost any further ground in the last month. Probably. Natalie Jackson on election forecasting. Chris Baylor on Joe Biden and political time. Elise Giuliano at the Monkey Cage on the ongoing protests in Russia. Anne Joseph O'Connell on reform and inspectors general. Norm Ornstein on the dysfunctional Republican Party. Ezra Klein on Republicans and democracy. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson on the case against the NRA. And Fred Kaplan on Hiroshima. | 
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