Donald Trump Approval Ratings: ‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams Explains Why They Are So Low
Assuming polling data is valid, much is and has been made of the historically low approval ratings for U.S. President Donald Trump. In the daily tracking poll for today, Rasmussen indicates that 42 percent of likely U.S. voters respond favorably to the president’s performance.
Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, theorizes that the Trump numbers are unlikely to improve, but that’s because traditional approval-related polling is less meaningful in the current highly polarized political environment.
Alluding to America’s improving economic conditions in the past year, he explained all this on his regular Periscope broadcast called “coffee with Scott Adams.” Adams long predicted that “master persuader” Donald Trump would win the presidency in Election 2016 because of what he describes as the ex-real estate mogul’s talent stack.
According to Adams, Hillary Clinton supporters and other anti-Trumpers, as he calls them, are too stubborn to give the president credit for anything good that happens in the country. The same phenomenon would be in play among Trump supporters, he added, if the former secretary of state had won the election because approval and accomplishment are no longer linked.
“Approval polls for presidents just don’t mean what they used to mean…That divide [between Clinton and Trump] was so great that when one of them won — and it didn’t matter which one of them won – the other side was going to say ‘I am never going to warm up to that one. I am not open-minded’…people really don’t cross that size of a divide mentally, so we now have a disconnection — and it’s a permanent one I think — between what a president will do and how successful they might be and their approval rating.”
Adams also asserted that relying on low approval ratings is a failure of analysis on the part of his opponents: “It’s not about the candidates; it’s about the gap between the candidates.”
In today’s broadcast, Adams separately insisted that “insanely popular” Oprah is too smart to run for president because it is way out of character given her image, despite all the buzz about her Golden Globes speech, a broadcast that lost 11 percent in the 18-49 demographic and five percent overall year over year, Variety detailed.
One of Adams’ viewers chimed in that if Oprah actually ran against Trump, it would be an election “between you’re fired and everybody gets a car.”
Scott Adams also anticipates that questions raised by liberals and Democrats about Trump’s mental competency will fizzle out when people continue to see him on TV behaving like he always has. Adams even claimed that there is a good chance that Trump will decline to seek reelection in 2020.
In October 2017, Bill Clinton’s former pollster pushed back against conventional wisdom about Donald Trump’s low approval ratings. He seemed to suggest that voters can hold at least two thoughts simultaneously, i.e., disliking Trump’s inflammatory or hyperbolic 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 as a first-time candidate. There are also published allegations in The Daily Caller and elsewhere that pollsters — who got the 2016 election wrong — tend to oversample Democrats in their surveys. History, for example, has shown that the experts’ insistence that Trump had a limited ceiling of voters was way off the mark.
Watch Scott Adams discuss Donald Trump’s approval ratings and other issues in the Twitter clip below and draw your own conclusions. Note that the reason he is pausing from time to time is that he is reading comments from viewers as they scrolled across the screen in the original, live Periscope transmission.
Scott Adams tells you why presidential approval polls don’t mean what they used to mean with. Bring coffee. https://t.co/0foOwm88VJ
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 8, 2018
