The gulf between President Donald Trump’s disapproval and approval numbers, according to Gallup’s weekly tally, went from 5 percentage points to 14 points last week.
The spike in net disapproval came amid intense criticism of the Trump administration’s migrant family separation policy. Last Sunday, Gallup showed Trump as having his highest approval rating, 45 percent, since the early weeks of his presidency.
According to Gallup, Americans who approved of Trump’s performance in office dropped from 45 to 41 percent between Sunday, June 17 and Sunday, June 24.
Over the same period, Trump’s disapproval number went from 50 to 55 percent.
Gallup tracks the percentage of Americans who approve and disapprove of the President’s performance in office based on telephone interviews with roughly 1,500 adults nationally, according to the polling firm. The poll’s margin of error is 3 percentage points.
In January, Gallup changed from daily to weekly approval updates. Sunday’s number “reflects a weekly aggregate of Monday through Sunday polling,” the firm said.
Heading back in the right direction! Let’s all hope Trump’s approval gets down in the 30s or lower by November.
No real surprise here. The policy is/was intensely unpopular, so of course it was damaging. But it takes time for people to digest things, and most people are not obsessive political junkies like us. This is why it is really maddening to see doom-and-gloomers posting, say, a 538 approval chart like three minutes after a big story breaks and being all “how can this be, HOW CAN THIS BE, his approval is steady/going up/whatever!”
Y’all. Settle down. This takes time. Give it a week and see if there’s a robust trend before you tear your hair out.
Somewhere I read (I wish I could remember) that a lot of these polls showing Republican support for Trump are skewed by the number of people who were Republicans but have left the party. Those who are left are is core supporters, but it’s a much smaller number than you think when the media throws out his Republican approval numbers.
This may end up being trump’s Katrina. Katrina ended Bush’s presidency because it took something everybody already knew – Bush was a barely competent goofball who couldn’t lead a government – and it made it abundantly obvious why that’s a big problem. Because when a barely competent goofball ignores a storm for days, then flies over from thousands of feet up, then says “Heckuva job, Brownie” when he finally does get to the scene, thousands of people die. It’s no longer just a punchline of late night comics’ jokes, but the confirmation of what everybody already knew, suddenly is recognized as a really big deal.
This may be similar. Everybody’s already known that he’s a bigot who doesn’t care about anybody else. And of course, we’ve known all along why that’s a really big deal. But the family separation crisis is making it abundantly obvious to all of America what happens when a bigot who doesn’t care about anybody else gets to implement policy – child abuse, destroyed families, crying toddlers, taking kids hostage for his political goals, kidnapping, etc etc… all while his wife wears clothing telling everybody “I really don’t care.” This might be the moment when America finally confirms what they’ve known about trump all along and now finally recognizes why it’s a really big deal to have somebody so cruel and hateful running our nation.
Funny how a drop in approval numbers happens when kids are caged, infants snatched from mothers, and children disappeared.