The polling on the incoming President is . . . interesting.
WSJ (“Voters Want MAGA Lite From Trump, WSJ Poll Finds“):
Voters support many of the goals President-elect Donald Trump has set for his second term. They are just not on board with all the ways he wants to accomplish them.
That is the central message voters are sending in a new Wall Street Journal poll, which finds that most want a tempered, less assertive set of policies than Trump promised in the most unbridled moments of his campaign. The appetite is for MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.
Looking into the data even at a cursory level, it’s more complicated than that. “Voters” is doing too much work here.
Some 53% want Trump to make significant changes in how government is run once he is inaugurated Monday. But more than 60% oppose one of his central ideas for doing so—replacing thousands of career civil-service workers with people chosen by the president.
More than 60% also oppose eliminating the Education Department, a marquee Trump proposal for paring the federal government. Only 18% would supersede congressional powers and give Trump more authority over federal spending, as he has proposed.
Similarly, the poll finds that, while voters want Trump to build his promised wall along the border with Mexico and address illegal immigration, they also want limits to his plans for sweeping deportations of undocumented immigrants.
Nearly three-quarters say that only those with criminal records should be removed from the country, and 70% would protect longtime residents from removal if they don’t have criminal records. Trump is planning to scrap a policy that focused arrests on serious criminals and discouraged officials from targeting illegal residents who have no criminal record.
So, in some cases, “voters” (which is a weird description when we’re talking about the policy preferences of the public and not prospective or retrospective behavior at the ballot box) overwhelmingly oppose Trump’s policies. But, again, it’s more complicated even than that.
Republicans remain overwhelmingly supportive of Trump’s cabinet nominations and handling of the presidential transition. But voters overall are equivocal: Some 46% approve of his nominations and 47% commend his performance as president-elect, with essentially equal shares disapproving.
Which is the other complicating factor: Republicans and Democrats are almost inverse in their support of these policies.
Regardless, the breakdown on policy issues looks like this:
- His promise to pardon people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol drew opposition from 57% of voters.
- More than two-thirds oppose using economic coercion or military force to take control of Greenland, while 57% oppose using coercion or force to retake control of the Panama Canal. Trump has said he cannot rule out such tactics to accomplish his territorial ambitions.
- Two-thirds oppose making Canada the 51st state, an idea that set off tensions between the two countries.
- Half say it is a bad idea for Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO advising Trump on federal spending cuts and other matters, to serve as an adviser, while 39% say it is a good idea.
- By a margin of 64% to 31%, voters oppose ending birthright citizenship—the constitutional provision that someone born in the U.S. is a citizen, which Trump has promised to try to eliminate.
- Voters place a high priority on protecting funding for education, healthcare and social safety-net programs—a caution for Trump and his advisers, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading an effort to identify large spending cuts. By about 60% to 34%, voters say protecting those programs is more important than cutting taxes or reducing the federal debt.
- Support is essentially split over another signature Trump plan—placing tariffs on imported goods—with 48% of voters in support and 46% opposed. At the same time, 68% also say that tariffs would make the products they buy more expensive.
So, even Republicans—presumably including a lot of those who voted for him—don’t support his more extreme and outlandish positions. Binary choices and all that.
What continues to fascinate me is that, while Trump is clearly more bombastic and menacing than ever, his popularity has actually increased. The WSJ poll shows him at 47% approval, compared to Biden’s 36%.
A study earlier in the week by 538’s G. Elliot Morris (“Why Trump is getting more popular“) shows it’s not just WSJ.
According to 538’s average of polls of Trump’s favorability rating, 47.2 percent of American adults have a favorable view of the president-elect, compared to 47.4 percent who have an unfavorable view. That means his net favorability rating — the difference between these two numbers — is now the highest it has been since our tracking began on Jan. 30, 2021. It’s also higher than his average net approval rating — a related but different metric that measured how many Americans approved of his job performance while he was president — was at any point after Feb. 2, 2017. Trump, in other words, is at or near an all-time high in popularity.
Morris’ analysis of the trends:
Trump’s rising popularity since Election Day 2024 is particularly notable. He has gained roughly 8 percentage points of net favorability in the average poll since Nov. 5. The president-elect’s net favorability was at -8.6 points then — around where he was for most of last year. An 8-point bounce is quite a feat in this day and age of stable public opinion; in all our tracking, Trump’s post-November bounce is only really rivaled by the bump in Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorability rating after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 election and she became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
So, what explains the rise in Trump’s rating? The simplest answer is that a number of Trump’s haters really have come around on him. Notably, Trump hasn’t improved his standing among just one segment of the electorate; according to a comparison of YouGov/The Economist polling from before and after the election, the share of Americans rating Trump favorably has increased among every gender, race and age group except people age 65+ — and even among them, his favorable percentage has “declined” by only 1 point (from 49 percent to 48 percent), which could easily be attributable to random noise in the polling. Even Democrats now rate Trump better than they did before the election.
Why the uniform shift? Maybe the contrast with Biden, who has a -18-point net favorability rating in 538’s average today, caused Americans to change their minds on the controversial Republican leader. Maybe the campaign reminded them of the pre-pandemic period of his presidency, in which the economy was generally good and inflation was stable; if you weren’t a news junkie (and most Americans aren’t), it frankly was easy to ignore some of the unpopular things he did during his term, such as his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And even for Americans who were paying attention to those things, it’s possible the economic story resonates more with them in retrospect.
But even if this is true, it’s worth questioning whether this is a permanent shift or just a temporary sugar high. It is easy, frankly, to see how the average American would approve of a president more after he scored a big win and when most of the negative aspects of his presidency are in the rearview mirror — at least for now. A post-election “honeymoon period” is common for newly elected presidents, including Trump in 2016 and 2017. In the two months after the 2016 election, Trump’s net favorability rating increased 17 points (from -21 points to -4 points) only to fall back to negative double digits by May, according to an average of polls published by RealClearPolitics. In fact, compared with this bounce, Trump’s current 8-point boost disappoints. According to RealClearPolitics, even Biden enjoyed a 7-point bounce after his win in 2020.
It’s likely a combination of factors but it’s clear that the excesses of the first term have faded in the minds of much of the public. My strong guess, though, is that a lot of the movement is from longtime Republicans who disapproved of Trump’s crudeness and excesses and have simply come to accept them as the cost of getting Republican policies passed.
