Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com
Donald Trump’s plunging approval rating has officially made him the most unpopular first-year president in the history of presidential polling, according to the latest figures from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The new poll shows Trump’s approval rating sitting at a historically low 32 percent, while his disapproval rating has soared to 67 percent. That leaves his net approval rating sitting 35 points underwater.
At this point in President Obama’s first term, the same AP poll found that 56 percent of Americans approved of his job performance, compared to 42 percent who disapproved. That works out to a 14 point net positive approval rating.
If you’re keeping track, that means Obama’s net approval rating was 49 points higher than Trump’s at the same point during his presidency.
And it just gets worse from there.
Only three in 10 Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the right direction, compared to 52 percent who say the country is worse off since Trump took office in January.
Just 23 percent of Americans overall and only half of Republicans think Trump has kept his campaign promises, which included pledges to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, and invest in a major nationwide infrastructure initiative. Trump has not followed through on any of those.
But the failure doesn’t stop there.
According to the new poll, only 25 percent of Americans say the country is better off since Trump took office — and even less (20 percent) say they are better off personally.
“By contrast, an AP-NORC poll conducted a year ago found that Americans were more likely to think the country had become better off over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency than worse off, 46 percent to 33 percent,” AP reports.
The same was true during at the end of President Obama’s first year in office, when a growing number of Americans across the political spectrum — Democrat, Independent, and Republican — said the country was heading in the right direction.
Ironically, Trump’s divisiveness is the issue that unites Americans the most. Only 9 percent think Trump’s presidency has helped unite the country, while 67 percent think the country is more divided because of Trump.
As AP pointed out, that figure is “far higher than the 44 percent of Americans who said in a poll one year ago that Obama’s presidency had served to divide the country further.”
Even among Republicans, 41 percent say Trump has divided America, compared to just 17 percent who say he has united the country.
These figures would be humiliating for anyone, but for a thin-skinned egomaniac like Trump, they’re downright brutal. Not only is he historically unpopular, but as the latest figures show, most Americans don’t have confidence that the rest of his presidency will be any better than his failed first term.
To make things even worse for Trump, nearly two-thirds of Americans said in a new poll that they believe he obstructed or impeded the Russia investigation, showing that his lies are not convincing anyone but his base.
With 2018 elections just around the corner, Republicans will have a decision to make: either reject Trump’s toxic brand, or attach themselves to it and sink to the bottom right along with him.
Your move, GOP. The country is watching.
