Trump Approval Ratings Drop Lower Than Impeachment Favorability, Base Begins To Shrink

More Americans are hoping for a Trump impeachment than are giving the new President Trump favorable approval ratings. Fox News reports that one Trump approval rating poll in the wake of the North Korea crisis this week showed that the president’s approval rating is up. This is common right before a president takes the country to war.

However, the Fox News report is not indicative of the majority of Trump approval rating polls. Further, the Fox News report is reporting on a conservative-based poll with a strong partisan flavor, giving Trump a 45 percent approval rating from a Rasmussen Reports poll. Unlike other polls, Rasmussen Reports methodology lacks transparency, and it is unclear how those numbers were obtained.

When all other Trump approval ratings over the past week are examined, the average shows that Trump’s approval rating is not just at a historic low for him, but historically low in comparison to every other president. Worse for Donald Trump, other recent polls are showing that more Americans want Trump impeached than approve of his job performance.

USA Today reports that a Quinnipiac University Poll out last week held Trump’s approval rating at 33 percent, a historic low for him. NPR reports that the most important finding from this poll is that Trump is losing a critical component of his base, white non-college voters.

Both a Gallup poll and a CBS News poll last week had Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent. USA Today reports these are “historically low numbers for the end of a president’s first six months in office.”

USA Today also notes the trends with presidents is to come into office with high approval ratings, typically higher than 50 percent, although this has not applied to every president. First terms also are notably higher in approval ratings than second terms.

If Trump continues on the downward slide that his approval ratings have taken since he took office, USA Today reports that this will make him the first president in history to never earn the support of a majority of Americans. This will make it difficult for him to pass any significant legislation while in office, which has already been seen on both his immigration and health care policy attempts.

A low approval rating for a president is attributed to multiple factors, such as a weak economy, unpopular international conflict, or the evidence of a high-level scandal. President Carter saw his lowest numbers after oil shocks and inflation occurred, whereas President Truman and President George W. Bush saw dips in their approval ratings over Korea and Iraq conflicts.

President Nixon enjoyed healthy approval ratings for most of his time in office, until the Watergate scandal.

Trump’s approval ratings come at a time when the economy is in good shape on average, and when the Middle East conflicts are manageable. USA Today reports that the odds are not in his favor for his approval ratings to go up.

But worse for Trump is the news that more Americans want him impeached than favor his job performance. New York Daily News reports that Americans are evenly split on a Trump impeachment, with 42 percent of Americans wanting him impeached and 42 percent against.

In a USA Today/iMediaEthics poll, polling director David Moore also noted the historical significance of America’s desire to see him impeached.

“These results suggest that Trump is probably the most beleaguered first-term president in the country’s history, and certainly in modern history.”

Forty-two percent support for a presidential impeachment is unprecedented for a president who has been in office for six months. New York Daily News reports that by comparison, a CNN/ORC poll showed that 33 percent of Americans wanted President Obama impeached, and 30 percent supported President George W. Bush’s impeachment.

Those polls taking the temperature on presidential impeachment occurred five years into both presidencies.

In the USA Today/iMediaEthics poll reported on by the New York Daily News, 46 percent of Americans do not believe Trump will finish his term. One in 10 Republicans also does not believe Trump will finish his term in this poll. Twenty-seven percent of all poll respondents believe Trump will be in office for four years.

Oddsmakers are also taking bets on how long he will be in office, with bets starting for 2017 being the year Trump leaves the Oval Office. Ladbrokes in the United Kingdom is taking bets, with odds for impeachment or resignation before 2020 being 11/10 odds, or a 48 percent chance Trump will not make it to 2020 in the Oval Office.

Oddsmakers at Ladbrokes also gives Trump a four to one chance of getting impeached or resigning in 2018, and eight to one odds it will happen in 2019.

The Russia scandal is a large cause of Trump’s historically low approval ratings. But there’s a bigger picture that shows Trump’s own base is leaving him. The rate his own voters are leaving him is currently at a trickle effect, but the trend suggests a flooding of Trump voters leaving the president could occur at any moment.

Trump’s tweets are a large source of concern to his voters, who tweet to him regularly asking him to stop. But many Trump voters are also having problems with him, as they see a new side of him after coming into office. One Trump voter called the president an “unsophisticated thinker” after this weekend’s white nationalist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one dead and 19 injured.

MAN DONT ****ing nuke NORTH KOREA, I VOTED FOR YOU BUT THIS IS BEYOND NUTS!!!!

— Jason (@TheBigProp) August 9, 2017

I voted for you, but at this point I honestly think you're just not an intelligent person. Like just really an unsophisticated thinker.

— Johnny (@MeJohnnyPatrick) August 13, 2017

More polls across the country echo some of these sentiments and show that the Trump honeymoon is over for many Republicans. New York Magazine has looked at Gallup data across key states Trump won, and their data reveals that Trump is “hemorrhaging the most support from college-educated white voters” in 13 states.

In seven states, Trump has dropped 10 points in approval rating, including in North Carolina and Florida where he is 19 points lower than the day he was elected. In Georgia, Trump is 18 points lower, 15 points lower in Ohio, 12 points lower in Virginia, and 11 points lower in both Michigan and Minnesota.

A common response on Trump approval ratings from Trump supporters that are still rooting for the president is to say that “these are the same polls that said Hillary would win.” This is, in some cases, correct.

However, every poll is a public opinion poll and a temperature gauge on the popular opinion or the “popular vote.” In that respect, the public opinion polls were right as Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote by 2,868,692 votes, according to the National Popular Vote Tracker.

New York Magazine reports that the “anemic” numbers for Trump now suggest that he benefited in November from the “Never Clinton” mentality. Or that, in other words, people voted for him because they did not want Hillary Clinton, and not because they wanted him in office.

But since Trump has taken office he has been beleaguered by one problem or scandal after another, with many scandals being one piece of the puzzle of the scandal of Russian interference with the election. This past week, the North Korea crisis has led some to favor Trump’s job performance more, but Vox reports that Republicans and Democrats alike are “united in their anxiety” about the threat of a looming nuclear crisis.

A CNN poll this week shows that two-thirds of Americans believe North Korea is a serious threat. That’s the highest number of Americans that have shown this concern since the year 2000, reports Vox. A whopping 82 percent of Americans are worried about nuclear war, according to an Axios poll on Friday, and 72 percent in a CBS News poll said the North Korea conflict made them uneasy.

Only 35 percent of respondents in the CBS poll are confident the president is qualified and capable to handle the North Korea situation, and 61 percent say they are “uneasy” in the president’s ability to handle this problem adequately. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats are uneasy with Trump in general in this poll, as are 22 percent of Republicans.

Trump’s approval ratings are likely to stay in this range until the Robert Mueller investigation on the Russia scandal is resolved. It is this scandal, however, that many believe is going to be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back that leads to a Trump impeachment.

[Feature Image by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Images]