Donald Trump Approval Rating Still At Historic Low: Support On Russia Investigation Slipping Away, Data Shows
After 519 days in office, the overall average approval rating for Donald Trump remains lower than for any past president except one, in the same point in his term, despite a slight move upward over the past two weeks, according to the average compiled by the political data site FiveThirtyEight.com. The weighted average compiled from dozens of polls collected by the site’s data analysts puts Trump’s approval rating at a mere 42.4 percent.
That’s lower than any president since Harry Truman in 1945, when pollsters first started asking voters about their approval of the United States president — except for President Jimmy Carter, who in 1978 after 519 days in office was a fraction of a percentage point below where Trump is now, standing at 42.1 percent. Carter’s popularity suffered from his seeming inability to do anything about the fast-rising inflation rate of the 1970s, inflation that hit an astonishing year-on-year rate of nine percent in 1978, as The Balance records, and continued to skyrocket through the next two years of Carter’s first and only term.
Trump’s average approval rating is up by a slight 1.1 points since June 6, but the minor uptick may be accounted for by the solid and overwhelming fandom he enjoys among members of the Republican Party. According to a Gallup Poll released on June 18, a whopping 90 percent of Republicans now say that they approve of Trump’s performance in office.
Democrats, on the other hand, approve of Trump at only a 10 percent rate, according to another Gallup approval rating poll. They also reported that Independents approve of Trump at 42 percent, marking the first time since February of 2017 in that poll that independents’ support of Trump has inched past the 40 percent mark.
But there is one issue on which even Trump’s hardcore Republican support appears to be slipping away from him — Russia. As The Inquisitr has covered on a regular basis, Trump’s campaign has been under investigation by first the FBI, and then the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for conspiring with the Russian government to illegally sway the results of the 2016 presidential election.
According to a CNN poll released on June 22, only 58 percent of Americans who say that they approve of Trump’s performance overall say that they are happy with the way he has responded to the Russia investigation. That’s only 29 points better than Americans at large, only 29 percent of whom say that they approve of Trump’s handling of the Russia issue.
That difference may seem significant, but on every other issue surveyed by CNN polls, self-proclaimed Trump supporters showed at least a 40 percent higher approval rating than the overall American electorate. To cite one instance, while 49 percent of Americans say they approve of Trump’s handling of economic issues, a staggering 93 percent of Trump supporters say that they are happy with Trump’s economic performance. That’s a difference of 44 points.
In another average of all polls, this one taken by the political site Real Clear Politics, Trump gets a slight benefit of the doubt from the site’s system of weighting responses. In the Real Clear Politics average, Trump’s approval stands at 43.7 percent. His disapproval rating is 51.1 percent in the Real Clear Politics average, while the FiveThirtyEight average sees Trump’s disapproval at 51.6 percent.
