538: 7 Rules For Reading Trump’s Approval Rating
Remarkable. Because we can't see the future (although I could easily predict that President Trump would be a major disappointment due to his behavior including his campaign promises and his rhetoric) we cannot see the Big Picture which which includes the next four or eight years. How short-sighted can we be? Think of how Americans saw the world in November 1941 in contrast to how it would be in November 1945. That's how a Crisis Era can go. The gangster regimes of Germany and Japan were doing very well at the time and the USA was the equivalent of a pack of four 80-pound Rottweiler dogs that a family trusts because the family and the dogs know the rules. But let that family go off to church, a movie, a school play, or the grocery store and someone see their home a suitable place for a burglary... four 80-pound Rottweilers make a predatory unit slightly more dangerous than a 320-pound tiger in the mangrove swamps of Bengal. The Pearl Harbor attack was a bolt out of the blue, and Hitler declaring war on the USA was a huge blunder. For that, key figures of the German and Japanese governments would pay grievous prices.
History moves fast in a Crisis Era, but it often moves in unpredictable ways.
So what did I see a year ago in the event of a Trump victory?
I saw him offending nearly a majority of the electorate no matter what he did as President. His rhetoric is rigid, reflecting a rigid set of values, and it offends too many sensibilities for him to win over people from among those who voted against him. The 46% of the vote that he got is the maximum that he could get under any circumstances. People who dislike him are given no cause to be proud of being an American except to show how uncharacteristic he is of America, let alone of prior Presidents. Getting 46% of the vote? That is about what Dukakis got in 1988 and McCain got in 2008, and both are considered electoral losers -- decisively so.
Contrast John F. Kennedy, who barely won the Presidency, and who had the ability to infuse optimism in people who did not support him initially. If one feels good about oneself one is likely to feel good about many things that over which one has little control -- like one's employer, the economic system, popular culture, and the political process. Was America ever happier than during "Camelot"? Maybe unless one was a Southern black left out of it, but that seemed likely to change. To be sure, Donald Trump is far from being as competent as FDR and as honest as Obama as he could be -- but he is as incompetent at infusing competence as Kennedy was good at it. If you think this a partisan screed, then replace "FDR" with Lincoln, "Obama" with Eisenhower", and "Kennedy" with "Theodore Roosevelt" or even "Reagan". If Trump isn't FDR, Obama, or Kennedy, then he isn't Lincoln, Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, or even Reagan. Of the eight Presidents mentioned in that group, all but two are on about everyone's Top Fifteen list of prior Presidents (all but Trump and either Reagan or Obama, the choice between Reagan and Obama being on where one is on the political spectrum if they seem so dissimilar). So far Donald Trump is a disaster.
If you thought Obama polarizing for what he is (looking as un-Presidential as he could possibly look even if his political background is fairly typical for a President, someone successful at every level of politics up to the Senate or a Governorship), Donald Trump is unlike any President in the last 120 years. He is a President without precedent, which would be fine if he were decidedly above average in political ability -- and he gets so much wrong that he looks catastrophically unfit to rule.
I thought America too wise to fall for a crass demagogue. I thought very wrong.
Key points from Nate Silver:
Note: bold material and information in tabular form or the chart are directly from Nate Silver:
Proposition No. 1: It’s easy to fight to a draw when your approval rating is only 37 percent.
Before his bungled response to the violence in Charlottesville (a fascist pig driving his car into counter-protesters, killing a pretty white girl, which is the worst thing that he could do for the image of his cause), the President's approval rating was already very poor. It's like the 2003 Detroit Kittens baseball team (which challenged the 1962 New York Mess [40-120] for being the worst team in the recent era of baseball [43-119]) having a ten-game losing streak -- who notices? People who thought Donald Trump awful before his bungled response to events in Charlottesville simply had more cause to dislike his Presidency.
Proposition No. 2: Be wary of claims that Trump has hit his approval rating ‘floor’ — so far, his numbers have been declining, not holding steady.
Something that I didn't notice. Of course there is statistical noise, and I am not going to take much notice of the difference between polls by difference in approval ratings between 40-57 and 37-58, whether between two different pollsters and their different methodologies and between two different days. Either difference is within the usual margin of error, so I don't see the immediate difference.
![[Image: silver-approval-08241.png?w=575&h=495&qu...strip=info]](https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/silver-approval-08241.png?w=575&h=495&quality=90&strip=info)
But there is a huge difference between a 44% approval rating and a 37% approval rating over seven months. The trend line for this President is unambiguously downward, and such a difference is almost twice the margin of error.
Proposition No. 3: If Trump does have a floor, it’s probably in the 20s and not in the 30s.
Approval ratings for the President of the time have gone into the 20s, including Truman (22% at times in his second term), Nixon (25% at the time of his resignation), and Dubya (24%). With Nixon the problem was moral turpitude; approval of Harry S. Truman rose and fell with the latitude of the front line in the Korean War; economic events suggesting a reprise of the economic meltdown that resembled the first stage of the Great Depression.
Americans aren't hurting from an economic meltdown, and there is no ongoing calamity in the Korean Peninsula -- yet. President Trump gets to ride the good will that his above-average predecessor created even as he excoriates that predecessor. But let the Dow lose 50% of its market value or (God forbid!!!) a nutty leader in North Korea turn even one large Japanese or South Korean city is turned from a vibrant urban area into a smoldering, uninhabited, radioactive ghost town with many of its denizens turned into ghosts -- and just imagine what that does to the attractiveness of President Trump as a leader. The accusations of collusion of his campaign with the Russians (intelligence services or the Russian Mafia) are either without foundation or are well known to people (federal prosecutors and courts, the CIA, or the FBI) who have good cause to not publicize what they already know -- because they can use these to great harm to the President or those connected more effectively in a court of law than in the public domain.
He will not be able to put the blame on liberals or upon dissident conservatives with whom he never got along. Such people might want to be rid of him even if such requires a military coup. I cannot say at what level of disapproval President puts him in such danger. Neither Truman, Dubya, nor even Nixon was anywhere near the megalomaniac that President Trump is. At the worst points of approval, the end was nigh for Truman (he was not going to run for a third term), Nixon (he resigned in disgrace), and Dubya (close to the end of his catastrophic second term. Americans could wait for an imminent end of the Presidencies of either of those three Presidents. Such an end is not in sight for President Trump, which makes a big difference. There were obviously no approval polls for Herbert Hoover in 1932, but we can just imagine how those would have been in October 1932.
Impeachment? The Democrats hold all the cards on that. They would be delighted to act in concert with a large minority within the GOP to remove this President, but only if the successor is a comparative moderate who solves more problems than he leaves intact. Mike Pence, even more illiberal than Donald Trump, would have to step down first and allow someone like Mitt Romney or Susan Collins become Vice-President and in turn '46'.
We have no quick and easy solution for Donald Trump within our Constitutional framework.]
The Founding Fathers established a political system predicated upon a wise electorate in which probity was an overwhelming norm, one in which people voted generally on the basis of morality and competence of the choices that they had. Americans could have voted for a Richard Nixon without knowing of his political demons, and they got away with it. A near-majority of the American electorate voted for Donald Trump even though his flaws (he was no more reactionary than Ronald Reagan) were glaringly obvious. We are less likely to get away with our political order intact with Trump as President than we were with Nixon.
Proposition No. 4: Expect bigger approval rating changes from issues that cut across partisan lines.
Effective Presidents get legislative successes even if a near-majority of Americans dislike the agenda, as with Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Ronald Reagan won a landslide re-election in 1984 with about 58% of the popular vote, and Obama might have gotten about 58% of the popular vote in 2012 had he not faced (1) a challenger as astute as Mitt Romney and (2) racial attitudes that cost him on the net a few per cent of the popular vote. There were more people unwilling to vote for any black person than those more likely to get to the polls to vote for the first American President with some presumed African origin than for anyone else. But Obama still won. Everybody loves a winner; President Trump has practically no legislative successes so far.
Donald Trump hates President Obama viscerally -- and he is no Ronald Reagan.
Proposition No. 5: Be especially wary of expecting big changes in Trump’s approval rating from ‘cultural’ issues.
America is already severely divided along 'cultural' lines, and there are no further 'cultural' values that he can offend. He can make catastrophic blunders in foreign policy. Presidents Emeritus are often the best people to get the current President out of a nasty scrape, as Bill Clinton found Jimmy Carter useful for an ugly situation in Haiti. We have five living Presidents Emeritus (Carter, the elder Bush, Clinton, the younger Bush, and Obama), but age precluding the ability of two to solve any problems, ill health negating Clinton as a solution to anything, the younger Bush a near-recluse to some very bad choices as President, then the only viable such person to meet a danger related to foreign policy is Obama. But the current President considers his Predecessor something close to being an Antichrist, which make him unavailable for now.
Proposition No. 6: Expect bigger changes when Trump’s behavior is truly surprising or defies promises he made to voters.
President Trump made promises, and his non-successes in forcing legislation that hurts the living standards of most people. This is exactly the President and Congress that could, if given the chance, shift federal taxation from income to consumption, eviscerate labor unions with a national right-to-work (for starvation wages) law if not outlaw labor unions outright and abolish the minimum wage and hour laws established in the 1930s so that American workers could get the dubious benefits of living as badly as they did in the 1920s. His failure at undoing Obamacare has kept him from going on to even-more-unpopular parts of an agenda of the Master Class that he pretended to oppose while a candidate for President.
Donald Trump is as nasty a capitalist pig as any Marxist stereotype can offer. He did make promises of jobs, but should the economy go into the tank, then his biggest promises to the white working class which never got a real recovery from the Panic of 2008 end up a stark and unforgivable failure.
Approval ratings for the Presidents 216 days into their administrations and the subsequent election beginning with Truman were:
Truman 33 40
Eisenhower 62 68
Kennedy 62 (assassinated)
LBJ 74 74 (identical based upon the timing of the JFK assassination and Election 1964)
Nixon 62 57
Ford NR 44
Carter 44 38
Reagan 42 58
Bush I 55 33
Clinton 47 55
Bush II 62 48
Obama 45 50
Those with approval ratings above 44% won; Ford barely lost, probably because he had no idea of how to run so much as a statewide campaign for election. Bush I had no idea of what to offer as a Second Act, Carter had a disastrous Presidency, and Truman had nine political lives going into 1945 and expended eight of those by the autumn of 1953. Dubya had gotten away with a lots of mistakes as late as 2004 and got away with them and barely got re-elected; Obama might have won re-election by a huge margin instead of a bare margin had it not been for we-all-know-what, and the rest won re-election with at least 370 electoral votes.
Reagan took his lumps early and recovered, which might be a promising analogue for President Trump in 2020. But Reagan at least solved problems that his predecessor could not solve. Donald Trump is not the new Ronald Reagan.
Remarkable. Because we can't see the future (although I could easily predict that President Trump would be a major disappointment due to his behavior including his campaign promises and his rhetoric) we cannot see the Big Picture which which includes the next four or eight years. How short-sighted can we be? Think of how Americans saw the world in November 1941 in contrast to how it would be in November 1945. That's how a Crisis Era can go. The gangster regimes of Germany and Japan were doing very well at the time and the USA was the equivalent of a pack of four 80-pound Rottweiler dogs that a family trusts because the family and the dogs know the rules. But let that family go off to church, a movie, a school play, or the grocery store and someone see their home a suitable place for a burglary... four 80-pound Rottweilers make a predatory unit slightly more dangerous than a 320-pound tiger in the mangrove swamps of Bengal. The Pearl Harbor attack was a bolt out of the blue, and Hitler declaring war on the USA was a huge blunder. For that, key figures of the German and Japanese governments would pay grievous prices.
History moves fast in a Crisis Era, but it often moves in unpredictable ways.
So what did I see a year ago in the event of a Trump victory?
I saw him offending nearly a majority of the electorate no matter what he did as President. His rhetoric is rigid, reflecting a rigid set of values, and it offends too many sensibilities for him to win over people from among those who voted against him. The 46% of the vote that he got is the maximum that he could get under any circumstances. People who dislike him are given no cause to be proud of being an American except to show how uncharacteristic he is of America, let alone of prior Presidents. Getting 46% of the vote? That is about what Dukakis got in 1988 and McCain got in 2008, and both are considered electoral losers -- decisively so.
Contrast John F. Kennedy, who barely won the Presidency, and who had the ability to infuse optimism in people who did not support him initially. If one feels good about oneself one is likely to feel good about many things that over which one has little control -- like one's employer, the economic system, popular culture, and the political process. Was America ever happier than during "Camelot"? Maybe unless one was a Southern black left out of it, but that seemed likely to change. To be sure, Donald Trump is far from being as competent as FDR and as honest as Obama as he could be -- but he is as incompetent at infusing competence as Kennedy was good at it. If you think this a partisan screed, then replace "FDR" with Lincoln, "Obama" with Eisenhower", and "Kennedy" with "Theodore Roosevelt" or even "Reagan". If Trump isn't FDR, Obama, or Kennedy, then he isn't Lincoln, Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, or even Reagan. Of the eight Presidents mentioned in that group, all but two are on about everyone's Top Fifteen list of prior Presidents (all but Trump and either Reagan or Obama, the choice between Reagan and Obama being on where one is on the political spectrum if they seem so dissimilar). So far Donald Trump is a disaster.
If you thought Obama polarizing for what he is (looking as un-Presidential as he could possibly look even if his political background is fairly typical for a President, someone successful at every level of politics up to the Senate or a Governorship), Donald Trump is unlike any President in the last 120 years. He is a President without precedent, which would be fine if he were decidedly above average in political ability -- and he gets so much wrong that he looks catastrophically unfit to rule.
I thought America too wise to fall for a crass demagogue. I thought very wrong.
Key points from Nate Silver:
Note: bold material and information in tabular form or the chart are directly from Nate Silver:
Proposition No. 1: It’s easy to fight to a draw when your approval rating is only 37 percent.
Before his bungled response to the violence in Charlottesville (a fascist pig driving his car into counter-protesters, killing a pretty white girl, which is the worst thing that he could do for the image of his cause), the President's approval rating was already very poor. It's like the 2003 Detroit Kittens baseball team (which challenged the 1962 New York Mess [40-120] for being the worst team in the recent era of baseball [43-119]) having a ten-game losing streak -- who notices? People who thought Donald Trump awful before his bungled response to events in Charlottesville simply had more cause to dislike his Presidency.
Proposition No. 2: Be wary of claims that Trump has hit his approval rating ‘floor’ — so far, his numbers have been declining, not holding steady.
Something that I didn't notice. Of course there is statistical noise, and I am not going to take much notice of the difference between polls by difference in approval ratings between 40-57 and 37-58, whether between two different pollsters and their different methodologies and between two different days. Either difference is within the usual margin of error, so I don't see the immediate difference.
But there is a huge difference between a 44% approval rating and a 37% approval rating over seven months. The trend line for this President is unambiguously downward, and such a difference is almost twice the margin of error.
Proposition No. 3: If Trump does have a floor, it’s probably in the 20s and not in the 30s.
Approval ratings for the President of the time have gone into the 20s, including Truman (22% at times in his second term), Nixon (25% at the time of his resignation), and Dubya (24%). With Nixon the problem was moral turpitude; approval of Harry S. Truman rose and fell with the latitude of the front line in the Korean War; economic events suggesting a reprise of the economic meltdown that resembled the first stage of the Great Depression.
Americans aren't hurting from an economic meltdown, and there is no ongoing calamity in the Korean Peninsula -- yet. President Trump gets to ride the good will that his above-average predecessor created even as he excoriates that predecessor. But let the Dow lose 50% of its market value or (God forbid!!!) a nutty leader in North Korea turn even one large Japanese or South Korean city is turned from a vibrant urban area into a smoldering, uninhabited, radioactive ghost town with many of its denizens turned into ghosts -- and just imagine what that does to the attractiveness of President Trump as a leader. The accusations of collusion of his campaign with the Russians (intelligence services or the Russian Mafia) are either without foundation or are well known to people (federal prosecutors and courts, the CIA, or the FBI) who have good cause to not publicize what they already know -- because they can use these to great harm to the President or those connected more effectively in a court of law than in the public domain.
He will not be able to put the blame on liberals or upon dissident conservatives with whom he never got along. Such people might want to be rid of him even if such requires a military coup. I cannot say at what level of disapproval President puts him in such danger. Neither Truman, Dubya, nor even Nixon was anywhere near the megalomaniac that President Trump is. At the worst points of approval, the end was nigh for Truman (he was not going to run for a third term), Nixon (he resigned in disgrace), and Dubya (close to the end of his catastrophic second term. Americans could wait for an imminent end of the Presidencies of either of those three Presidents. Such an end is not in sight for President Trump, which makes a big difference. There were obviously no approval polls for Herbert Hoover in 1932, but we can just imagine how those would have been in October 1932.
Impeachment? The Democrats hold all the cards on that. They would be delighted to act in concert with a large minority within the GOP to remove this President, but only if the successor is a comparative moderate who solves more problems than he leaves intact. Mike Pence, even more illiberal than Donald Trump, would have to step down first and allow someone like Mitt Romney or Susan Collins become Vice-President and in turn '46'.
We have no quick and easy solution for Donald Trump within our Constitutional framework.]
The Founding Fathers established a political system predicated upon a wise electorate in which probity was an overwhelming norm, one in which people voted generally on the basis of morality and competence of the choices that they had. Americans could have voted for a Richard Nixon without knowing of his political demons, and they got away with it. A near-majority of the American electorate voted for Donald Trump even though his flaws (he was no more reactionary than Ronald Reagan) were glaringly obvious. We are less likely to get away with our political order intact with Trump as President than we were with Nixon.
Proposition No. 4: Expect bigger approval rating changes from issues that cut across partisan lines.
Effective Presidents get legislative successes even if a near-majority of Americans dislike the agenda, as with Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Ronald Reagan won a landslide re-election in 1984 with about 58% of the popular vote, and Obama might have gotten about 58% of the popular vote in 2012 had he not faced (1) a challenger as astute as Mitt Romney and (2) racial attitudes that cost him on the net a few per cent of the popular vote. There were more people unwilling to vote for any black person than those more likely to get to the polls to vote for the first American President with some presumed African origin than for anyone else. But Obama still won. Everybody loves a winner; President Trump has practically no legislative successes so far.
Donald Trump hates President Obama viscerally -- and he is no Ronald Reagan.
Proposition No. 5: Be especially wary of expecting big changes in Trump’s approval rating from ‘cultural’ issues.
America is already severely divided along 'cultural' lines, and there are no further 'cultural' values that he can offend. He can make catastrophic blunders in foreign policy. Presidents Emeritus are often the best people to get the current President out of a nasty scrape, as Bill Clinton found Jimmy Carter useful for an ugly situation in Haiti. We have five living Presidents Emeritus (Carter, the elder Bush, Clinton, the younger Bush, and Obama), but age precluding the ability of two to solve any problems, ill health negating Clinton as a solution to anything, the younger Bush a near-recluse to some very bad choices as President, then the only viable such person to meet a danger related to foreign policy is Obama. But the current President considers his Predecessor something close to being an Antichrist, which make him unavailable for now.
Proposition No. 6: Expect bigger changes when Trump’s behavior is truly surprising or defies promises he made to voters.
President Trump made promises, and his non-successes in forcing legislation that hurts the living standards of most people. This is exactly the President and Congress that could, if given the chance, shift federal taxation from income to consumption, eviscerate labor unions with a national right-to-work (for starvation wages) law if not outlaw labor unions outright and abolish the minimum wage and hour laws established in the 1930s so that American workers could get the dubious benefits of living as badly as they did in the 1920s. His failure at undoing Obamacare has kept him from going on to even-more-unpopular parts of an agenda of the Master Class that he pretended to oppose while a candidate for President.
Donald Trump is as nasty a capitalist pig as any Marxist stereotype can offer. He did make promises of jobs, but should the economy go into the tank, then his biggest promises to the white working class which never got a real recovery from the Panic of 2008 end up a stark and unforgivable failure.
Approval ratings for the Presidents 216 days into their administrations and the subsequent election beginning with Truman were:
Truman 33 40
Eisenhower 62 68
Kennedy 62 (assassinated)
LBJ 74 74 (identical based upon the timing of the JFK assassination and Election 1964)
Nixon 62 57
Ford NR 44
Carter 44 38
Reagan 42 58
Bush I 55 33
Clinton 47 55
Bush II 62 48
Obama 45 50
Those with approval ratings above 44% won; Ford barely lost, probably because he had no idea of how to run so much as a statewide campaign for election. Bush I had no idea of what to offer as a Second Act, Carter had a disastrous Presidency, and Truman had nine political lives going into 1945 and expended eight of those by the autumn of 1953. Dubya had gotten away with a lots of mistakes as late as 2004 and got away with them and barely got re-elected; Obama might have won re-election by a huge margin instead of a bare margin had it not been for we-all-know-what, and the rest won re-election with at least 370 electoral votes.
Reagan took his lumps early and recovered, which might be a promising analogue for President Trump in 2020. But Reagan at least solved problems that his predecessor could not solve. Donald Trump is not the new Ronald Reagan.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.