Not the kind of numbers that suggest going to war with Iran or placing a blanket 15% tariff on all imports are good ideas, politically speaking. But, of course, no one can credibly accuse Trump of being a strategic mastermind.
And here is the polling average from FiftyPlusOne:
BTW, Johnathan Bernstein reminds us that SOTUs are not effective tools for improving public opinion of the president.
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on Twitter and/or BlueSky.
Just the other day, the MAGAs at Lucianne.com were high-fiving each other over Trump’s tremendous approval rating. I have no idea what poll or polls they had in mind. Were there any such, or have the Trumpkins gotten to the point where they hallucinate the results they want??
This is really amusing, since every poll I’ve seen shows Trump sinking like a stone.
He’s hit his floor. He’s been at 37, 38 a number of times previously. The intensity of disapproval seems stronger this time around, but there’s not yet the collapse we crave.
Just the other day, the MAGAs at Lucianne.com were high-fiving each other over Trump’s tremendous approval rating. I have no idea what poll or polls they had in mind. Were there any such, or have the Trumpkins gotten to the point where they hallucinate the results they want??
An InsiderAdvantage poll from last week had Trump at +4.
@Neil Hudelson:
The Trump hardcore has shrunk a bit, maybe 3 points, give or take. He’s at a plateau, but it’s a lower plateau than the previous plateau. When you look at intensity, though, it’s twice as hardcore on our side – the MAGAts are losing heat.
We just have to not fuck up the midterms. We need both houses to stop any more Trump justices. I’m not happy with the amount of triumphalism coming from Democrats right now. Something about counting chickens before hatching occurs. But if we pull it off Trump and MAGA are finished.
@Kylopod: Seemed like a super weird outlier. Minimal poll though, only 800 “Likely Voters” (iirc), which notoriously is not a great metric. Unless InsiderAdvantage also has LV state screens reflecting the absolute spankings Republicans have taken since last summer, it’s really hard to see that as anything but a methodology problem or straight statistical anomaly.
Quick look at the crosstabs, they’ve got Hispanic at 43% approve and 47% 18-39 approve, both of which are completely out-of-family with all other polls. It’s also got “No Opinion” at 4.4%, which is about 2% higher than every other poll out there. Just something fishy about claiming that Likely Voters have no opinion of the guy that even non-voters have extremely strong opinions of.
@ptfe: Thank you for doing the deep-dive so the rest of us don’t have to.
I did look a little into how well the poll has fared in past elections. Their final poll for VA governor had Sherill up by 1 point, when she went on to win by 13.8. In fairness, that poll was from mid-October, a good three weeks from the election.
For the NJ race, their final poll was just a couple of days before the election, and it did have Spanberger up by 10–though that’s a miss of 5 points.
They also overestimated Republican candidates in most of the 2022 races.
But they did fare reasonably well in 2024, which is the sort of thing responsible for those headlines you see on right-wing sites “Most accurate 2024 pollster says …!” where a pollster that consistently says things Republicans like to hear does well during good Republican years but is way off the rest of the time.
I’m not happy with the amount of triumphalism coming from Democrats right now. Something about counting chickens before hatching occurs.
This is always a tricky needle to thread. You need voters to be optimistic enough to feel like voting will make a difference, but scared enough that they actually do it.
That said, it’s really early to be gauging that sort of thing. Pay attention to the apathy/disappointment/enthusiasm trends in October.
@Kylopod: Seems like they have a Likely Voter screen that assumes general apathy, which is good in an unexcited year like 2024 and complete trash for the current climate. It was probably also trash in 2020. Hating Trump is a strong motivator…
To quote James Carville: “it’s the economy, stupid.”
What will cause El Taco’s approval rate to collapse is a recession. I expected one on his first term, but that didn’t quite happen. There was a recession due to COVID, but it didn’t last long, and the various government checks doled to the general population through various programs helped a lot to get through it (and I mean A LOT).
Concurrent with this, corpses piled up, hospitals were filled, people were miserable, but as the economy didn’t feel that bad, all was almost ok.
Short of the LLM bubble bursting soon, I don’t think we’ll have a recession. Slow growth with few jobs and persistent inflation is not good, but it’s not the end of the world*. People are mad enough about the economy, as well as the broken impossible promise to bring prices down, that the GQP should have nightmare midterms and likely lose the white house if the trends persist.
But EL Taco won’t drop much more in popularity in the meantime.
* If your neighbor loses their job, that’s a tragedy. If you lose your job, it’s the end of the world.
I briefly looked into InsiderAdvantage a bit earlier today. When I googled IA, the results noted that they sometimes release polls jointly with Trafalgar Group. I don’t recall other pollsters regularly conducting polls jointly with other pollsters. But maybe it’s a thing I had not noticed in the past.
Silver’s grades as of : IA gets a B+, Trafalgar Group a B. However, the table includes an entry that appears to evaluate their joint polls. That grade is C/D.
A few strays I found follow.
-On Trafalgar:
Per Silver, via Wiki, Trafalgar had one of the lowest average errors in 2020. The same entry also highlights Trafalgar predicted Trump to win in 2020. They correctly forecast Trump carrying FL and NC. But they also incorrectly forecast a Trump victory in AZ, NV, PA, GA, and MI.
Whether they have valid reasons or not, Split Ticket does not include TG in their averages.
-the comments on this Silver post are interesting.
One speculates that some pollsters game Silver’s system by publishing ‘propaganda’ polls until the timeframe Nate uses to grade the firm, at which point they heard to get a good grade.
Similar, another argues that right-wing firms published polls in an attempt to manipulate polling averages ahead of the 2022 midterms.
InsiderAdvantage and Trafalgar Group have among the lowest error rates among national pollsters in the three presidential election cycles in which Trump was the Republican nominee. Both firms are among the very few national pollsters who consistently find the so-called “shy Trump voter,” using their respective survey methods.
This is written more like a Press Release edited by a Bannon staffer.
Also in that post, IA touts rising public awareness of potential criminal referrals for Obama officials for conduct during the 2016 campaign in spite of the legacy media ‘blackout’. Again, seems more like a barking Breitbart blogpost than a careful pollster.
-Speaking of Breitbart, Google included recent tweets in its results. The first one is a link to a Breitbart post as a defense of IA’s methods and track record.
-probably a different species, but I also scanned this Politico article about pundits such as Miranda Devine and Jack Posobiec commissioning polls by Rasmussen as a means of promoting their books and maintaining name recognition. But the lede is buried—Rasmussen approached the pundits, offering there services. But the purpose seems to be not be evaluating public opinion.
Devine said she didn’t come up with the sponsorship idea but was pitched to pay for the poll by TED CARROLL, a partner with Rasmussen parent company Noson Lawen Partners. “I have a good relationship with them. They sometimes give me previews of the polls, an early embargo, so I get to break stuff, it’s a symbiotic relationship,” she said. Asked how much she pays to sponsor a poll, she declined “to go into that private business with you.”
“Most accurate” can mean several different things and may vary depending on how it is evaluated. Silver may get a different result from Morris may get a different result from Cohn may get a different result from Enten.
The state of the union speech is one of those weird American rituals – campaign “debates” are another – that pundits and the Washington press corps talk about endlessly as if they are of stupendous importance, but which are in fact tediously predictable exercises lacking any significance whatsoever. A major presidential speech may have held some interest last century, but in an era when we are constantly bombarded by far more government bullshit than we can ever absorb, this will be nothing but another Trump campaign rally performance.
I do feel sorry for people whose jobs require them to sit through it, no matter how many surprise guest acts Trump introduces to try to liven things up.
Short of the LLM bubble bursting soon, I don’t think we’ll have a recession.
In terms of political impact, whether we’re in a recession is less important than whether Americans believe we’re in a recession. Most Americans do believe we’re in one currently, and they held that belief in 2024 as well.
As for Covid, that was such a unique event it’s hard to find historical parallels when it comes to political impact. It seems intuitive that a recession during an election year (real or perceived) is never good news for the incumbent party, yet (as I’ve mentioned before) polls at the time showed Americans continuing to give him positive marks on the economy even while giving him negative marks on his handling of the pandemic. That was an advantage he maintained throughout his entire first term. He’s completely lost that advantage now since there’s nothing external to blame it on anymore, and he continues the self-inflicted wound of not only enacting tariffs but making sure everyone know about them and that he’s the one enacting them.
Really, that’s just when the general public tends to start zeroing in on who they will vote for, although I think this year will be different. Maybe. Things are bad enough that people who don’t typically pay much attention to campaigns are aware.
Just the other day, the MAGAs at Lucianne.com were high-fiving each other over Trump’s tremendous approval rating. I have no idea what poll or polls they had in mind. Were there any such, or have the Trumpkins gotten to the point where they hallucinate the results they want??
This is really amusing, since every poll I’ve seen shows Trump sinking like a stone.
He’s hit his floor. He’s been at 37, 38 a number of times previously. The intensity of disapproval seems stronger this time around, but there’s not yet the collapse we crave.
@CSK:
An InsiderAdvantage poll from last week had Trump at +4.
@Neil Hudelson:
The Trump hardcore has shrunk a bit, maybe 3 points, give or take. He’s at a plateau, but it’s a lower plateau than the previous plateau. When you look at intensity, though, it’s twice as hardcore on our side – the MAGAts are losing heat.
We just have to not fuck up the midterms. We need both houses to stop any more Trump justices. I’m not happy with the amount of triumphalism coming from Democrats right now. Something about counting chickens before hatching occurs. But if we pull it off Trump and MAGA are finished.
@Kylopod:
Well, that must be the straw at which they’re grabbing.
@Kylopod: Seemed like a super weird outlier. Minimal poll though, only 800 “Likely Voters” (iirc), which notoriously is not a great metric. Unless InsiderAdvantage also has LV state screens reflecting the absolute spankings Republicans have taken since last summer, it’s really hard to see that as anything but a methodology problem or straight statistical anomaly.
Quick look at the crosstabs, they’ve got Hispanic at 43% approve and 47% 18-39 approve, both of which are completely out-of-family with all other polls. It’s also got “No Opinion” at 4.4%, which is about 2% higher than every other poll out there. Just something fishy about claiming that Likely Voters have no opinion of the guy that even non-voters have extremely strong opinions of.
@ptfe: Thank you for doing the deep-dive so the rest of us don’t have to.
I did look a little into how well the poll has fared in past elections. Their final poll for VA governor had Sherill up by 1 point, when she went on to win by 13.8. In fairness, that poll was from mid-October, a good three weeks from the election.
For the NJ race, their final poll was just a couple of days before the election, and it did have Spanberger up by 10–though that’s a miss of 5 points.
They also overestimated Republican candidates in most of the 2022 races.
But they did fare reasonably well in 2024, which is the sort of thing responsible for those headlines you see on right-wing sites “Most accurate 2024 pollster says …!” where a pollster that consistently says things Republicans like to hear does well during good Republican years but is way off the rest of the time.
Oh, and ignore the fact that I mixed up which Dem was in which race–Spanberger was VA, Sherill NJ.
@Michael Reynolds:
This is always a tricky needle to thread. You need voters to be optimistic enough to feel like voting will make a difference, but scared enough that they actually do it.
That said, it’s really early to be gauging that sort of thing. Pay attention to the apathy/disappointment/enthusiasm trends in October.
@Kylopod: Seems like they have a Likely Voter screen that assumes general apathy, which is good in an unexcited year like 2024 and complete trash for the current climate. It was probably also trash in 2020. Hating Trump is a strong motivator…
To quote James Carville: “it’s the economy, stupid.”
What will cause El Taco’s approval rate to collapse is a recession. I expected one on his first term, but that didn’t quite happen. There was a recession due to COVID, but it didn’t last long, and the various government checks doled to the general population through various programs helped a lot to get through it (and I mean A LOT).
Concurrent with this, corpses piled up, hospitals were filled, people were miserable, but as the economy didn’t feel that bad, all was almost ok.
Short of the LLM bubble bursting soon, I don’t think we’ll have a recession. Slow growth with few jobs and persistent inflation is not good, but it’s not the end of the world*. People are mad enough about the economy, as well as the broken impossible promise to bring prices down, that the GQP should have nightmare midterms and likely lose the white house if the trends persist.
But EL Taco won’t drop much more in popularity in the meantime.
* If your neighbor loses their job, that’s a tragedy. If you lose your job, it’s the end of the world.
@ptfe: @Kylopod:
I briefly looked into InsiderAdvantage a bit earlier today. When I googled IA, the results noted that they sometimes release polls jointly with Trafalgar Group. I don’t recall other pollsters regularly conducting polls jointly with other pollsters. But maybe it’s a thing I had not noticed in the past.
Silver’s grades as of : IA gets a B+, Trafalgar Group a B. However, the table includes an entry that appears to evaluate their joint polls. That grade is C/D.
A few strays I found follow.
-On Trafalgar:
Per Silver, via Wiki, Trafalgar had one of the lowest average errors in 2020. The same entry also highlights Trafalgar predicted Trump to win in 2020. They correctly forecast Trump carrying FL and NC. But they also incorrectly forecast a Trump victory in AZ, NV, PA, GA, and MI.
Whether they have valid reasons or not, Split Ticket does not include TG in their averages.
-the comments on this Silver post are interesting.
One speculates that some pollsters game Silver’s system by publishing ‘propaganda’ polls until the timeframe Nate uses to grade the firm, at which point they heard to get a good grade.
Similar, another argues that right-wing firms published polls in an attempt to manipulate polling averages ahead of the 2022 midterms.
–From IA’s website:
This is written more like a Press Release edited by a Bannon staffer.
Also in that post, IA touts rising public awareness of potential criminal referrals for Obama officials for conduct during the 2016 campaign in spite of the legacy media ‘blackout’. Again, seems more like a barking Breitbart blogpost than a careful pollster.
-Speaking of Breitbart, Google included recent tweets in its results. The first one is a link to a Breitbart post as a defense of IA’s methods and track record.
-probably a different species, but I also scanned this Politico article about pundits such as Miranda Devine and Jack Posobiec commissioning polls by Rasmussen as a means of promoting their books and maintaining name recognition. But the lede is buried—Rasmussen approached the pundits, offering there services. But the purpose seems to be not be evaluating public opinion.
The anti-Biden authors paying for Biden polls (link to archived version)
@Kylopod:
“Most accurate” can mean several different things and may vary depending on how it is evaluated. Silver may get a different result from Morris may get a different result from Cohn may get a different result from Enten.
The state of the union speech is one of those weird American rituals – campaign “debates” are another – that pundits and the Washington press corps talk about endlessly as if they are of stupendous importance, but which are in fact tediously predictable exercises lacking any significance whatsoever. A major presidential speech may have held some interest last century, but in an era when we are constantly bombarded by far more government bullshit than we can ever absorb, this will be nothing but another Trump campaign rally performance.
I do feel sorry for people whose jobs require them to sit through it, no matter how many surprise guest acts Trump introduces to try to liven things up.
@Kathy:
In terms of political impact, whether we’re in a recession is less important than whether Americans believe we’re in a recession. Most Americans do believe we’re in one currently, and they held that belief in 2024 as well.
As for Covid, that was such a unique event it’s hard to find historical parallels when it comes to political impact. It seems intuitive that a recession during an election year (real or perceived) is never good news for the incumbent party, yet (as I’ve mentioned before) polls at the time showed Americans continuing to give him positive marks on the economy even while giving him negative marks on his handling of the pandemic. That was an advantage he maintained throughout his entire first term. He’s completely lost that advantage now since there’s nothing external to blame it on anymore, and he continues the self-inflicted wound of not only enacting tariffs but making sure everyone know about them and that he’s the one enacting them.
@Jen:
You mean act as if I were a normal, rational person not obsessed with politics?
@Michael Reynolds: Ha! Fair point. 🙂
Really, that’s just when the general public tends to start zeroing in on who they will vote for, although I think this year will be different. Maybe. Things are bad enough that people who don’t typically pay much attention to campaigns are aware.