Are Trump’s numbers finally ticking up?
If we go by Gallup, yes, he does seem to have ticked up a bit. I call it the Trump Storm Surge. Starting with Hurricane Harvey and continuing into Irma, Trump’s presence as caregiver in chief, stumbling as he’s been, does seem to have slightly buoyed his public support.
Trump spent the last week of August at his lowest sustained approval of his presidency, bouncing around 34% and 35% approval on Gallup’s daily tracking poll. Then between September 1st and 3rd he moved from 34% to 38%. That’s immediately after Harvey’s landfall in Texas and the catastrophic rains and flooding in Houston. Since then Trump has bounced in a small range between 38% and 36% approval.
What does this mean? Probably not that much. Or rather, probably not that much unless subsequent events suggest it was the beginning of something more enduring. The first thing to remember is that these are very, very small differences. At the extremes it’s four percentage points between a low of 34% approval and a high of 38% approval. That’s basically just bouncing around within the margin of error.
Conceivably it could just be noise. But it’s more likely, given how it coincides with recent hurricane news, that it is a small improvement in public approval tied to seeing the President in the ‘caregiving President during natural disaster’ role which is a hallmark of the modern presidency. He hasn’t handled it perfectly. We remember all the moments of his praising the big turnouts at shelters or saying how everything was going great. But it’s Trump. The bar is very low.
The thing to look at now is what happens over the next week. Over the last eight months, Trump’s numbers have tanked when health care policy and Trumpcare have dominated the news. Since Republicans are now making a last try to repeal Obamacare and deprive tens of millions of their health insurance coverage, we’ll soon be able to see if that pattern holds up.
