It’s still early, but President Trump might not get the polling bump he’s hoping for from the end of the Mueller investigation.
A new poll from Morning Consult finds that Trump’s approval rating is virtually identical to where it was last week: 42 percent approved of the job Trump is doing, and 55 percent disapproved.
The poll, conducted Monday and Tuesday, is just a snapshot during a period where voters were just getting their heads around Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress that Mueller had found Trump didn’t collude with Russia and left the question of obstruction open. Trump and Democrats are furiously fighting to characterize the letter’s findings, and the release of the actual Mueller report, if that occurs, could dramatically shake things up once again.
The Barr letter also doesn’t appear to have broken through in a major way with voters — at least not yet. Just 35 percent had heard “a lot” about Mueller’s findings, the poll found, numbers on par with those around Paul Manafort’s sentencing and significantly lower than those who knew much about his border emergency declaration or the college bribes scandal.
That could change — it’s still early, and the complicated issue may take a while to bake in with voters. But right now the Barr letter appears to be more of a political Rorschach test than a game-changer — and Trump’s gleeful if inaccurate claims that he’s been “fully exonerated” don’t seem to be improving his standing with voters.
