President Donald Trump’s approval ratings have been remarkably stable, a bizarre contrast to all the news out of his administration. The Fix’s Philip Bump revives the argument that it’s less about Trump than it is about partisan polarization: We all have such strong attachments to our parties, especially the “negative partisanship” of hating the other party, that presidential approval is now always going to be stable since all it reflects is tribalism.
I still think that conclusion is flat-out wrong.
The biggest counterargument is the presidency of George W. Bush, who (as Bump’s data show) had remarkably unstable approval ratings. It’s probably true that partisan polarization has intensified a bit over the last decade or so, but it was already quite strong during Bush’s presidency. And yet it didn’t prevent him from reaching record highs and challenging the worst-ever lows.
It’s also, in my view, inconsistent with Trump’s record lows (during the polling era). He’s currently at 40.7 percent approval, according to FiveThirtyEight. That’s pretty good for Trump, toward the top of the range he’s been in since last May. But it’s also the worst of any polling-era president this many days into his first term. After Trump, the lowest after 431 days in office are Harry Truman at 45.2 percent, Gerald Ford at 45.5 percent, Ronald Reagan at 46 percent, Barack Obama at 48.3 percent and Jimmy Carter at 50.1 percent. Trump’s been in last place, and usually by an even larger margin, for almost his entire term, although in another month or so he’s finally likely to escape that status, at least for a while.
My guess – and I think the conventional wisdom as well – is that Trump’s low but stable ratings are a combination of the constant flow of negative stories about the administration and him personally along with good news about the economy. Trump has managed to alienate pretty much everyone who could be alienated by normal news, but he still has the support of Republicans inclined to support their president during good times. That’s a larger group than those who would support their party’s president no matter what – a number that’s always been around 25 percent. We haven’t tested that, because Trump hasn’t been president during a high-casualty war or during a recession, two events that have pushed even party loyalists away from their president.
But rather than Bump’s conclusion that politicians are no longer “rewarded or punished for any actions they might take,” the truth is that Trump has been sharply punished: He has the worst approval ratings ever for this point in his presidency! It’s just that he’s not further punished for each little commotion. Or, perhaps, and depending on one’s view of the economy, it may just take Trump’s ability to constantly generate negative stories to keep his approval ratings down so low despite the constant pressure (from good economic news) for them to go up.
After all, after many years of stability during a period of not-quite-peace and almost-sort-of- prosperity, Barack Obama’s approval ratings rallied some 10 percentage points in his final year, perhaps as a result of the slow recovery finally convincing people that good times were here. I don’t think Trump is capable of stopping the flow of negative stories, but if he was and everything else stayed the same, I suspect he’d be quite a bit more popular in time. And meanwhile, if everything stays the same but the economy goes bad, I strongly suspect he would wind up below 30 percent approval. And nothing that’s happened so far during his presidency even hints against that. Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg
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