Donald Trump Approval Rating Polls Remain At Low Levels As Americans Say Racial Tensions Are On The Rise
Donald Trump once again failed to push his overall job performance approval rating past 42 percent, sitting below that historically low number for the second week in a row, according to a statistical average of all major approval polls compiled by the political data site FiveThirtyEight.com. Trump’s prolonged and historic run of unpopularity, in which his approval rating has never broken past the 43 percent mark, has now continued unbroken since March of 2017.
Trump may take some small amount of good news from the polling average this week, however. His 41.9 percent mark on August 10 was a half-point higher than his overall approval rating seven days earlier. At the same time, his disapproval rating — the percentage of Americans who not only say that they do not approve of Trump’s job performance, but assert that they actively disapprove — took a tiny dip, from 52.8 percent disapproval on August 3 to 52.5 on August 10.
In polls released during the past week, Trump performed best in those polls that, according to FiveThirtyEight.com‘s pollster ratings, tend to show a bias in favor of Republicans. His best showing came in an online poll conducted by Harris Interactive in which Trump scored a 51 percent approval rating. But that Republican-leaning poll appeared to be a statistical outlier, with numbers posted by Ipsos/Reuters (42 percent approval) and YouGov (40 percent) appearing more typical.
The YouGov poll, released August 9, also showed that Trump’s support among black Americans remains almost nonexistent, with one percent saying that they “somewhat approve” of Trump, and two percent of black respondents to the poll saying that they “strongly approve.”
That result may also be reflected in a new CBS News poll, also conducted for the network by YouGov, released on Sunday that shows growing concern among all Americans that tensions between races have increased under Trump.
According to the poll, 61 percent of Americans believe that racial tensions have become worse over the past year, while only 10 percent say that relations between races have improved — and 29 percent say there has been no change over that time period. Majorities of both black Americans and white Americans feel that racial tensions are rising — but black Americans are more likely to perceive the breakdown in race relations, with 78 percent saying tensions have become worse. Among whites, 56 percent feel that way.
While a majority of Americans in the CBS poll, 58 percent, say they disapprove of Trump’s handling of racial issues with only 41 percent saying they approve, those opinions correlate strongly with political party affiliation. A full 83 percent of Republicans say that Trump is doing a good job handling race relations — but 90 percent of Democrats say they disapprove of how Trump has approached the problem on racial tensions in the United States.
