Donald Trump Approval Rating Polls Show No Recovery For Underwater Numbers, State Polls Showing Decline

The latest approval rating polls show that Donald Trump continues to be held in low regard by the large majority of Americans. The only good news for Trump emerging from Sunday’s FiveThirtyEight.com average of all approval polls being that his approval has not dropped significantly from the previous week. On the other hand, Trump’s approval rating has not improved at all, while his average disapproval rating has held at 53 percent.

That’s only one-tenth of a percentage point higher than seven days ago, while his approval rating of 42 percent is down slightly from 42.2 last week. Those numbers also leave Trump’s place in the history of approval polls largely unchanged. Since presidential approval polling began in 1945, the only first-term elected president to fare worse than Trump at the same point in his term is Jimmy Carter in 1978, with Carter registering 39.9 percent after 541 days from his inauguration.

As the Inquisitr reported, Carter faced a series of economic problems, many of which were out of his control, such as double-digit inflation rates that had been steadily climbing since 1973, when Richard Nixon was still president. The inflation rate under Trump is just 2.8 percent yet he has so far proven unable to elevate himself out of his position at the bottom of the approval rankings since 1945.

At the same point in his term, the president with the highest approval rating was George W. Bush in 2002, when Bush was still enjoying a boost in polls due to a “rally around the president” phenomenon in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as Gallup noted.

Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama stood at 46.9 percent after 541 days, still almost five points better than where Trump finds himself now. But there has been more bad news for Trump beyond the nationwide polls of his job approval and disapproval. According to a report by Vox.com, Trump’s support in swing states that helped give him his 2016 Electoral College victory has shown steady erosion since Trump took office in January of last year.

Despite losing the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, as the election data site 270 To Win records, Trump managed to pull out a victory in the Electoral College, with 306 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232, by winning extremely narrow margins in key states.

But as of June 2018, “Trump is currently polling better in Florida than he is in Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Utah, Nevada, or North Carolina (all states that proved crucial to his 2016 presidential win),” Vox.com wrote.

“Trump’s state-by-state approval rating has significantly dropped over the past year and a half. In January 2017 he had a net-positive approval rating in almost every state in the country, except California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island. That’s far from the case now.”

In particular, wrote Vox.com political analyst Matthew Yglesias, Trump now finds himself “underwater” in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin as well as in Iowa and Ohio. All of those states were essential to Trump’s 2016 election victory.

According to an analysis by Cook Political Report, Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a combined total of 77,759 votes. And in fact, in those states, only one county in each state accounted for the difference that gave Trump his victory. Without those three counties, Trump would have lost all three states, and with them, the Electoral College. But those states are now in the negative category for Trump, according to a map by the polling organization Morning Consult.