Donald Trump Approval Rating Is Actually Higher Than These Headline-Making World Leaders
While U.S. President Donald Trump’s low approval rating has consumed much media bandwidth, it turns out he might be doing a lot better in that department than the three Ms, i.e., Europe’s most influential political leaders.
Assuming the Trump approval rating pollsters use a valid methodology, the president’s popularity apparently hovers around 42 percent, which nonetheless exceeds that of President Macron, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Prime Minister May, who preside over Europe’s powerhouse economies.
“[A]ccording to Zogby Analytics, the leaders of France, Germany, and Britain — all of whom are far less maligned by the liberal media than Trump — are each less popular than the U.S. president,” Breitbart London noted about the favorable/unfavorable compilation of the 45th president’s EU counterparts.
According to the online survey conducted by Zogby Analytics comprised of 600 adults in each of those three countries, the center-left Emmanuel Macron — who won the French presidency on May 7 in a landslide over National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the second round of voting — has just a 28 percent favorability rating. Among other things, Macron’s initiatives watering down worker job protections in France has prompted outrage and intense street protests.
The de facto chief executive of the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a 40 percent approval rating according to the Zogby data. Merkel was re-elected on September 24 as Germany’s top government official, but her party, the Christian Democrats, fell to its lowest share of the vote since 1949, failing to win a majority in the German parliament in the process, in part because of her open-borders immigration policy. Negotiations with several smaller parties to form a coalition government fell through today, suggesting that another election could be called soon.
Like Macron, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May also records a 28 percent favorability rating in the Zogby survey. Even though the next general election was not scheduled until May 2020, May called a snap election on June 8 to increase her leverage in the Brexit negotiations. Her Conservative party underperformed in the balloting, however, and she was forced to forge a coalition with the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party to hold on to her job.
When someone talks about @realDonaldTrump approval numbers, perhaps this comparative graphic will assist: Data Source -> https://t.co/lBImMfc0Vl pic.twitter.com/7yyKMvgMJJ
— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) November 20, 2017
Last month, Bill Clinton’s former pollster pushed back against conventional wisdom about Donald Trump’s approval rating. He seemed to suggest that voters can hold at least two thoughts simultaneously, i.e., disliking Trump’s inflammatory tweets or comments (or by extension, unnecessary feuds with his political foes), but still back the policies of the man who was a former Democrat and independent and who ran for and won the presidency on the GOP ticket.
Despite his controversial/polarizing style, factors that may be moving in Trump’s favor, include improved economic conditions and consumer confidence, a surging stock market, job growth, progress on making international trade deals more even-handed, and a willingness for companies (such as semiconductor giant Broadcom) to relocate to and/or expand operations in the U.S.
In the context of Trump polls allegedly oversampling Democrats and thus skewing the Trump approval rating, John Zogby, the founder of the Zogby poll, told The Daily Caller several months ago that “I am a liberal Democrat, but I always felt that other polls oversampled Democrats and undersampled Republicans.”
[Featured Image by Evan Vucci/AP Images]
