Trump’s going to enter the White House with an approval rating in the high 30s. This is not great.
His approval ratings will likely matter greatly to a president who doesn’t have the full support of his own party; if it becomes politically expedient to abandon him, I don’t think there is much doubt that they will.
What do you think his approval rating will be on January 20, 2017, one year into his presidency? I promise to come back to this thread in one year’s time to revisit.
Assuming you meant 2018, I’m going to guess that it won’t be much lower than it is today. Those who love him will still love him, no matter if he shoots someone in the middle of 5th Avenue. His approval is pretty near the floor of where it can be, I think he’ll be at about 25% approval for the remainder of his one and only term.
Yes, 2018. Sorry.
For the official transcript: I voted 30-40%.
I can’t vote, as I’m super-shy about predictions. I suspect by then we’ll have begun a major new military operation (like, 60% suspect), and that’s gonna polarize opinion even further. To the extent that it’s credible that it’s in response to a terrorist attack on us, I think his approval will go through the roof: Americans love them some righteous military action. but opposition will become stronger as well.
Otherwise, I don’t think there are a lot of folks who are on the fence but will come around to his side of things.
As Left Hand says, I fear he’ll enjoy an upward swing with an inevitable terrorist attack of some description and his inevitable ‘rigorous’ (i.e. reckless) response to it. Although whether it will be enough to push him into re-election territory I couldn’t guess.
Ooops. I clicked the wrong one. I meant 20-30%.
This may be true and is quite troubling. There is nothing that benefits a president more than a terrorist attack. There is no incentive to prevent such attacks, rather there is incentive not to stop them and enjoy the rallying sentiment such attacks generate.
Beyond foreign affairs and attacks etc., presidential popularity tends to rest on a lot of other things that are both unpredictable and beyond presidential control, most notably the state of the cyclical economy.
Trumpists don’t change their minds based on evidence.
He got a bump when he won the presidency, but it has started to fade. I think it will continue to fade as people discover that president Trump isn’t really any different from campaigning Trump except that he lies about the things he’s done rather than what he’s going to do. His die hard fans will support him, but those who voted for him just because he wasn’t Clinton are going to fall off. So he’ll probably go back to what his approval rating was during most of the election, (low 30’s).
I don’t think that a terrorist attack or war will necessarily bring back his approval, since he is so polarizing and has made so many enemies in the media that the first reaction might not be that we all need to come together, but rather than its all Trump’s fault.
I picked 30 -40, because (like others) I think there is literally nothing Trump could do to lose the support of his base. Many of them don’t even follow the news, and have no idea whatsoever what is going on in the country. Trump could be carted away gibbering to a psychiatric hospital after biting the heads of chickens at his next press conference, and be kept there for a year, and people would still answer polls with “Trump is doing an excellent job”.
Absent a war, Trump will not break 40% during his presidency. He won’t drop under 30% either.
I guess I’m still hoping that the people who voted for Trump will start to realize they’ve been duped. 30-40% is probably more realistic.
Whoever just picked >80% must figure we’re headed for Kim Jong Il territory, where it is a criminal offence to disagree with Dear Leader.
Sad and disturbing but true. His base of supporters is absolutely clueless. Among these idiots, his approval rating will match the high praises being sung by Steve Bannon via his cronies at Brietbart. They don’t pay attention to actual news, because it’s full of things that contradict their beliefs and besides, real news is always mean to their hero.
Well, there is one thing that might do it. If Trump pushed for a gun ban, I can’t imagine that his supporters love him more than they love guns.
For the record, I voted 20-30%. I recognize he has a floor, but I think he can go lower than he currently is. I know from the majority of the Trump voters that I know personally, that most voted against Clinton, and don’t particularly like Trump; many actively dislike him as well. It wouldn’t take much to drag them into an anti-Trump stance.
30% probably the whole time. He will get points for not being black to racists and not being liberalish for neocons.
His base base, pun intended, is not 30%. Only 40% of eligible voters actually voted. More than half the votes went to Clinton. So we’re already at less than 20% of the electorate which liked him or hated Clinton enough to vote for him. Clinton hatred will fade, eventually (although people who are still longing for the return of the Confederacy make me wonder about this). Add in the inevitable disenchantment of many who were dumb enough to think that “shaking things up” would magically get them their jobs back and their whiteness prioritized, and my guess is he’s going to fetch up against 12%.
He’ll always get the white supremacist approval, but what percent of the populace is that really? I don’t know.
There’s a kind of built-in limitation; if it goes too low, he’ll simply be removed from office. So <20% is probably not functionally possible.