We have a new NBC poll out this morning which shows a small but non-trivial rise in Trump’s public approval – from 40% in August to 43% today. The poll has a 3.3% margin of error. So you might say, that’s noise, not any real change. Possibly. But it’s broadly in line with other polls like Gallup. All the polls showing the same modest improvement suggests it is not statistical noise but something real, albeit small and perhaps ephemeral.
There are a couple points to note here.
First, the improvement seems to come mainly from two developments: hurricane storm response and Trump’s deal with Democrats. The poll asked respondents about Trump’s handling of 11 different issues and events. The highest rated, at 71%, was Trump’s deal with Pelosi and Schumer. With this deal, Trump mildly softened opposition in the center without losing much support from his base. Thus the slight uptick. (Intensity of support or opposition remain basically unchanged with 25% intense support and 42% intense opposition.) Another way to look at this, though, is that Trump’s mild improvement is probably dependent on a steady stream of natural disasters and more deals with Democrats. We might morbidly note that by pulling out of the Paris climate accord Trump might be on track to engineer an unending string of natural disasters and a perpetual weather catastrophe/poll improvement feedback loop. Still, these are challenging grounds for a Republican President to build a resurgence on.
The other point to note in this poll is that the upshot of recent weeks is that Republican voters are turning against the party’s congressional leaders. If Republicans had been pumped out the party’s congressional leaders we wouldn’t have Trump as President in the first place. So this isn’t new. But the upshot of recent weeks isn’t to sour Republicans on Ryan and McConnell rather than Trump. Trump hasn’t gotten anything done? That’s not Trump’s fault, in this view. It’s McConnell and Ryan’s fault.
On the one hand, GOP opposition to GOP congressional leaders is a bad way to go into a midterm election. On the other hand, a party fundamentally lives or dies in a midterm on the popularity of the president. This poll shows the congressional generic ballot moving from 50-42 in the Democrats favor in June to 48-42 today.
One final point. As I mentioned yesterday, the clear pattern this year is that when the subject is repealing Obamacare it’s bad for Trump. When Republicans stop trying, he recovers or at least stabilizes in public approval. The new effort to repeal Obamacare has only begun to break through in the national news in the last two or three days. The polls next week will tell us whether that pattern holds up.
