Tag: poll
New 538 Poll Average Shows Trump Approval In Steep Decline

New 538 Poll Average Shows Trump Approval In Steep Decline

President Donald Trump's honeymoon is officially over.

The convicted felon's job-approval rating is now underwater, according to 538’s polling average, and it’s happened just a little more than one month into his second term.

According to 538’s average, which sadly is unlikely to be updated anymore after ABC News laid off the site’s entire staff on Tuesday, 47.9 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing in office, while 47.6 percent approve.

The polling average largely tracks with a Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos, which found 52% of voters disapprove of the job Trump is doing, compared with 48 percent who approve.

According to 538’s average, Trump's job approval rating is in a state of steep decline. On Inauguration Day, his net approval rating was +8.2 percentage points, and now it is -0.3 points.

"Trump’s approval rating is underwater again—a month and a half after beginning his term with his highest approval ratings ever (+8)," Jacob Rubashkin, an elections analyst with the outlet Inside Elections, wrote in a post on X.

The quick end to Trump's honeymoon is in stark contrast to past presidents.

Former President Joe Biden had a positive approval rating until September of his first year in office, according to 538’s average. Former President Barack Obama had a net-positive approval rating until around August 2010—well over a year into his first term—according to 538’s historical averages. And former President George W. Bush had a net-positive rating nearly his entire first term in office, before the public soured on him around May 2004.

Public opinion on Trump has dropped amid the chaos he and his administration have wrought on the country.

The mass purge of the federal workforce, led by co-president Elon Musk, has left thousands out of work and others worried about negative downstream economic impacts.

The tariffs Trump imposed on China, Canada, and Mexico have led to a steep decline in the stock market amid fears that the results of Trump's policy will once again stoke inflation.

And Trump's embrace of murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin over U.S. ally Ukraine is also deeply unpopular.

“We’re going to look at presidents at this point in their presidency, right, and the word here that I would use to describe Trump is awful. In fact, the only person who does worse than Trump does right now with a +1 net approval rating is himself back in 2017, when he was at -8,” CNN’s Harry Enten said on Tuesday -- before the FiveThirtyEight average turned negative.

Enten continued, “Donald Trump is doing historically awful.”

And with the economy teetering on the brink of a recession, Trump's approval rating could tumble even further.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

President Elect Donald Trump

As Trump Takes Office, His (And Musk's) Approval Ratings Still Underwater

As Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office for a second time, he claims to have a “massive” mandate to enact his destructive agenda. But new polling shows that’s far from the truth.

A NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll released Wednesday shows that just 44 percent of Americans view Trump favorably, while 49 percent view him unfavorably. That’s nearly identical to the 45 percent approval rating Trump has in Civiqs’ tracking poll.

The fact that Trump is viewed unfavorably before he even takes office is a warning sign for his tenure. The start of a presidential term is usually when a president is at their high-water mark of approval.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, 51 percent of registered voters approved of the job he was doing on the transition, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll at the time.

In the first two months after Barack Obama was sworn in as president, around 60 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to 538’s historical polling average. And when he was sworn in again four years later, his approval rating was around 53 percent.

The NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll has other warning signs for Trump.

Just 31percent of Americans say the tariff policy Trump plans to enact would help the economy. That should be a flashing red warning light for Trump, showing that Americans will likely blame him if those tariffs cause prices to skyrocket, as economists expect.

What’s more, 62 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s plan to pardon people who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes for their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

It’s not just Trump who is unpopular among voters. Trump's Cabinet nominees are also underwater.

Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Defense, has just a 19 percent approval rating in the NPR/PBS News/Marist College survey. And the survey was conducted before Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, when Democratic senators laid bare the nominee’s abhorrent behavior of alleged sexual assault, womanizing, on-the-job drinking, and misogynistic remarks.

Twenty-six percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Hegseth, with the remaining 55 percent not knowing who he is or having no opinion of him.

However, Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk, is broadly unpopular. Only 37 percent of Americans have a favorable view of him, while 46 percent view him unfavorably, according to the poll. That’s also a warning sign for Trump, who is allowing Musk to hog the spotlight and even letting the awkward billionaire occupy an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is next door to the White House.

Ultimately, while it’s awful that Trump will be sworn in for a second time, polling suggests that he will have no honeymoon phase and that backlash to his agenda could be a serious problem for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Poll: Americans Don't Trust Trump, Oz Or RFK Jr. To Protect Public Health

Poll: Americans Don't Trust Trump, Oz Or RFK Jr. To Protect Public Health

Donald Trump and his picks to lead American health care policy do not have the support of the public, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The Axios/Ipsos American Health Index poll shows that only 32 percent of Americans trust Trump on health issues. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, fares even worse with only 30 percent. And only 23 percent of Americans trust Mehmet Oz, Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Trump’s picks to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, and the FDA, Marty Makary, fare even worse with support levels of 15 percent and 14 percent, respectively. But it’s likely that many Americans have no idea who those two people are, and that’s why they don’t trust them.

By contrast, Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, enjoys 45 percent trust. Trust is even higher for existing health agencies, with 66 percent of Americans trusting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 62 percent backing the National Institutes of Health.

His years of attacking the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, certainly doesn’t help Trump’s trustworthiness on health care. Since he began his political career in 2015, Trump has pushed for repealing the program while offering nothing (to this day) to replace it. Trump backed legislation in 2017 that would have left millions of Americans without coverage and was thwarted by a unified Democratic Party and three breakaway Republican senators.

The history of his nominees on health issues also brings significant negatives to the table.

Kennedy has peddled debunked conspiracy theories on a host of medical issues, most notably his false assertion that childhood vaccination is connected to autism. Oz, a failed Senate candidate and former TV host, has been criticized for peddling dubious pills and supporting the privatization of Medicare.

Bhattacharya is an economist at Stanford University who proposed largely allowing COVID-19 to spread—despite the virus’ significant public health risk—while Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, opposed mandatory vaccination, even though vaccination was ultimately key to restoring normalcy across the world.

Arguably, the biggest failure that Trump is associated with in his first presidential term was related to health care. On his watch, over 396,800 Americans died from COVID-19—following months of Trump repeatedly misinforming the public on the severity of the virus and denying states the resources they needed to fight infections.

This new poll from Axios/Ipsos shows that Trump’s narrow election win has not given him any kind of boost on the key issue of public health, and the low quality of his nominees isn’t helping.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump, Harris

Trump Campaign Concludes With Incessant Whining About Bad Polls

Former President Donald Trump and his campaign are closing out the 2024 campaign not with confidence, but with a crap ton of whining about how unfair it is that he’s not being treated as the odds-on favorite.

The bellyaching began Saturday night, when Ann Selzer—an Iowa-based pollster who has been an oracle of sorts in predicting which candidate had the momentum in the final days of the last three elections—released a shock poll finding Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa.

Trump accused Selzer of voter suppression, and said any polls showing him losing should be illegal.

“It is called suppression. They suppress,” Trump said of the Iowa poll at one of his low-energy rallies on Sunday. “And it actually should be illegal. Because in many ways, it is worse than the written word."

Trump’s campaign also sent out a memo accusing media outlets of trying to suppress the vote by releasing polls showing Trump losing.

“On Saturday, top Democrats appear to have received early access to an absurd outlier poll of Iowa conducted by the Des Moines Register. Not to be outdone, the New York Times arrived right on cue with another set of polling data being used to drive a voter suppression narrative against President Trump’s supporters,” the campaign wrote in the memo, referring also to a spate of NYT polls showing Harris ahead in Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Georgia—enough to give her an Electoral College victory. “Some in the media are choosing to amplify a mad dash to dampen and diminish voter enthusiasm. It has not worked. Our voters are like President Trump: they fight.”

Of course, if Trump’s campaign had internal numbers showing Trump ahead they’d release them to counter the narrative. Instead of doing that, they’re lashing out—a sign they know they are losing.

But it’s not just polls Trump and his allies are whining about.

CNN also reported that Trump is privately complaining to his close allies about why women don't like him—apparently not understanding that women don’t like it when their freedom to make decisions about their own bodies is taken away from them.

They’re also publicly incensed that Harris made a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live” on Saturday night in a pitch-perfect sketch.

"It's a campaign ad, I mean they're trying to get her elected,” Trump sycophant Brian Kilmeade moaned on Fox News.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida,, who gave up his dignity to back Trump, accused “SNL” and “virtually every single media outlet in America to depress and suppress Republican votes and Trump voters.”

Rubio said Harris, “went to ‘Saturday Night Live,’ by the way in violation of the law. My only hope, I hope she laughed on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in front of millions of people, millions of people probably heard her laugh for two or three minutes, because that’s probably worth 2- to 3-million votes right there."

Harris, meanwhile, is projecting strength in the home stretch. She’s filling rallies with tens of thousands of people, and ending on a closing message of hope.

“Trump is spending the closing days of his campaign angry and unhinged, lying about the election being stolen because he’s worried he will lose,” Harris spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth and will walk into the Oval Office focused on them—that’s Vice President Harris.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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