Donald Trump: polls of approval and favorability

[pbrower2a]

Here is a model for predicting the 2020 Presidential election:


https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump/

Here are the states (I assume that the District of Columbia was among those with negative net approval) in January 2017



-10 or higher net disapproval
-5 to -9
-1 to -4
neutral (white)
1 to 4
5 to 9
10 or higher net approval


Suffice to say -- the President started with much good will. Check the link and follow the instructions for numerical detail. This was fair warning that liberalism was in hibernation, if not moribund, in America.

If net approval is the vote in the net election, then Trump ends up with all but 72 electoral votes, ending up with a blowout win of 466-72.


Some states that President Trump had lost were as follows:

Illinois +9
New York +8
Virginia +8
New Mexico +17

His barest losses:

Michigan +7
Pennsylvania +10
Wisconsin +6
Florida +22

.....

Obviously, once one starts governing one will no longer be able to live on promises when things start going bad. Some people will be dissatisfied with what they get. Practically every successful President gets some loss from the goodwill that follows the election to the hard reality of being unable to achieve what one promises -- or people liking what is promised once they find out what it is. Not since perhaps Kennedy have we had a President whose approval is long higher than the vote for him. We will never know how well Kennedy would have done in the 1964 Presidential election.

By June 2017, net approval for President Trump is negative in every state that he lost except Virginia -- but he is also underwater in approval in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Things have been rather stable since then.

So here is what Morning Consult has for August 2018. In most of last month, Manafort was still on trial and Michael Cohen had yet to cop a plea bargain to get himself the best deal he could get (and hurt the legal position of the President), so as with even a road map it is already obsolete.




-10 or higher net disapproval
-5 to -9
-1 to -4
neutral (white)
1 to 4
5 to 9
10 or higher net approval

236 electoral votes (figuring that ME-02 is 10% more D than Maine at large) are presumably out of reach of the President, and 59 are outside of the margin of approval. This is a more charitable estimate to President Trump than what I have for him have based on 100-DIS(approval) or such a measure as an answer to the question "would you rather vote to re-elect Donald Trump or vote for someone else?", whichever is worse for him.

Do I like this analysis? Not really except for its timeliness and its offer of results every month for all states. Some of the results are simply counter-intuitive. It hardly makes sense that South Dakota and North Dakota are so different in polling of net approval, which can be right when political reality is changing (think of the Clinton collapse and GOP surge in 2016). Likewise I find it hard to believe that Nebraska and Florida have about the same net disapproval, or that Oklahoma has lower disapproval for Trump than a raft of other states.

And note that this excludes data for the time after some troublesome convictions or plea bargains by Trump associates. September polling results which follow the plea bargain of the President's personal attorney are more likely to coincide with my polling map.

All polls are estimates.