Top News

History says Trump’s low approval rating is unlikely to move

Published

4 years ago

on

What is the point: We still have five months until the general election, which, in theory, has plenty of time for the president’s race to change. Indeed, horse racing polls have sometimes shifted far between this point and Election Day.

However, the presidential approval rating has historically not moved much since June of the election year being Election Day.

It seems very likely at this point that Trump’s approval rating will be south of 50% and his net approval rating (approval – rejection) becomes negative when people vote. That should be very troubling for Trump, given the strong relationship between approval ratings and chances of re-election.

There are 13 presidents who are running for another term in the election era (since 1940). For each of those presidents, I compared the Gallup average (or, in the case of 1944, the Office of Public Opinion Research) June approval rating and they estimated approval rating on election day.

The average president has seen changes in his approval rating by only 3 points from now until the election. That will only make Trump a mid-40s at best. Trump’s approval rating is similar during the middle semester of 2018, when his party lost control of the DPR.

The net approval rating tells the same story. The president on average has a net approval rating shift by only 6 points from this point forward. Given Trump’s net approval rating at a negative low until mid-teens, a 6-point increase will land him with a net approval of around -7 to -10 points on Election Day. Once again, that’s where he is in the middle of 2018 semester.

See the 2020 presidential election ballot

Trump, it’s not over yet. Maybe the president’s ranking has shifted. Harry Truman saw a 20-point increase in his net approval rating in the last five months of the 1948 campaign. On the other hand, Lyndon Johnson’s net approval rating dropped by about 15 points in the final months of the 1964 election.

See also  The European Union plans to raise $ 825 billion to blunt the corona virus recession

However, we are only talking about two presidents out of 13 whose net approval ratings rose by more than 10 points in the last five months of the campaign. One of them went in the wrong direction for the president. Trump needs his net approval rating to go up by more than 10 points to achieve a positive net approval rating.

Trump’s fate of former Vice President Joe Biden will not be perfectly correlated with his approval rating, but it will be highly correlated. Our last CNN / SSR poll, more than 90% agreed Trump said they would vote for Trump. More than 90% of disappointment said they would vote for Biden.
One previous estimate of FiveThirtyEight’s Silver Nate suggested that a president with a 40% approval rating in June before the election only had about 20% chance of winning the next election. That’s mostly jibes with more sophisticated model which takes into account many indicators.

Can Trump be one of the 20%? Clear. Don’t round 20% to 0%.

Remember, however, Trump’s approval rating has been great from any president before him. There is no strong reason to think that he will get a greater than average increase in his approval rating and therefore the chance of his re-election.
Trump’s inability to move his own numbers is probably why he chased Biden so much. Biden is less defined than Trump, and dragging Biden down might be Trump’s only chance of winning.

Related Topics:
Click to comment

Trending

Exit mobile version