Trump Approval Rating Still Lowest In Last 70 Years, But Slightly Ticked Up Following Statement On Roy Moore


The latest data on President Donald Trump’s approval rating shows that he is still the least popular president of the last seven decades or so by a healthy margin. A further look at the numbers, however, suggests that this metric had slightly gone up in the two days since the president issued his official statement on the sexual harassment allegations made against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Since Donald Trump first took office in January, FiveThirtyEight has been monitoring the president’s approval and disapproval ratings, tracking them from day one up to the present and comparing them against the ratings of 12 past U.S. presidents, chronologically starting with Harry Truman and ending with Barack Obama. As of today’s Thanksgiving update, Trump’s approval rating is at 38.4 percent, holding steady from yesterday’s figure, but 0.3 percent higher than it was on November 19 and 20, when the rating was at 38.1 percent.

As noted by Newsweek on Wednesday, the above figures are almost 10 percentage points lower than the next least popular president’s approval rating at the same time in his term. As of the 308th day of his presidency, Bill Clinton had an approval rating of 48.1 percent in 1993. At the time of Newsweek‘s report, Ronald Reagan was third-to-lowest with a 49.3 approval rating in his 307th day, but FiveThirtyEight‘s updated figures show Reagan’s rating going up to 52.6 percent the day after. That puts him slightly ahead of Gerald Ford (49.6 percent) and Barack Obama (50.6 percent) as of their respective 308th days in office.

FiveThirtyEight‘s approval rating tracker, as the website states, is an “updating calculation” that takes into account the results of public polls such as those from Gallup, Rasmussen Reports, and the American Research Group, and makes adjustments for different variables, including poll quality, recency, sample size, and partisan lean.

Despite FiveThirtyEight still showing Donald Trump’s approval rating being far behind that of his most recent predecessors, Newsweek pointed out that the president has long contested the results of public polls, referring to his statistically poor performances as “fake news.” On November 14, Trump tweeted that the Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll had him at 46 percent, adding that there are “some people” who think his approval rating should be in the 50s. As of the November 19 to 21 Rasmussen poll cited on FiveThirtyEight‘s tracker, Trump has an approval rating of 44 percent and a disapproval rating of 54 percent.

The slight increase to Donald Trump’s approval rating came two days after the president spoke to reporters about Alabama’s Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore, amid a slew of sexual misconduct allegations made against him. According to CNN, Trump “all but [endorsed]” Moore, stressing his denial of the accusations and adding that Alabama doesn’t need a “liberal Democrat” like Moore’s opponent, Doug Jones.

“[Moore] denies it. Look, he denies it. If you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours. He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen. And look, you have to look at him also.”

While Donald Trump’s approval rating didn’t seem to change much following the Moore statement, Ronald Reagan’s aforementioned 3.3 percentage point increase in popularity came around the time he signed the National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), a top secret directive allowing the CIA to offer their support to, and to recruit Nicaraguan Contra rebels, as recalled by Manning Live.

[Featured Image by Kevin Dietsch – Pool/Getty Images]

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