Donald Trump Approval Rating Crashes To Lowest Point In Nearly A Year Thanks To Pain Of 34-Day Shutdown

With the government shutdown over Donald Trump’s “border wall” demand grinding into its record 34th day and 800,000 federal workers about to miss a second paycheck, according to CNBC, Americans are losing patience with Trump as indicated by a new set of approval rating polls issued on. Wednesday. The polls show his approval taking a dizzying dive, with one poll showing Trump’s disapproval rating a whopping 17 points higher than his approval. In the overall average of Trump’s approval rating polls compiled by the political data site FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump’s average approval rating of 39.5 percent on Wednesday marked the first time since September 12 that Trump’s approval sank below the 40 percent line — and his lowest average rating since almost exactly one year ago — January 25, 2018 — when Trump’s average approval hit an even 39 percent. But the percentage of Americans who actively disapprove of how Trump has been handling his job rose to 55.9 percent, the highest level of negative opinion toward Trump since February 25 of last year, when his disapproval hit 55.6 percent. The new individual polls paint an even grimmer picture for Trump. In an Associated Press/NORC poll released on Wednesday, only 34 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s job performance. That’s the lowest mark of his two years and three days in office, in the same poll, and represents an eight-point drop since the AP/NORC poll released one month earlier.

Also on Wednesday, a CBS News poll showed Trump with 36 percent approval, while a Politico/Morning Consult poll had Trump at 40 percent — but with 57 percent disapproval, as the Daily Beast reported. An earlier poll showed that much of the erosion in Trump’s approval is coming from the voters he needs most, white men and women without college degrees, who form Trump’s electoral “base” but whose approval of Trump has dipped as a result of the shutdown, as the Inquisitr reported. Another poll released on Tuesday, also covered by the Inquisitr, showed that every Democrat running to oppose Trump in the 2020 election would beat him easily. But it may be too early to make judgments regarding Trump’s 2020 reelection chances, however. Looking at Trump’s overall average approval rating according to FiveThirtyEight, only one United States president since approval rating polls began in 1945 had a lower rating than Trump at the same point in his term, 734 days in. That would be President Ronald Reagan, who after 734 days suffered a dismal approval rating of 37 percent — 2.5 points lower than where Trump now sits. But when Reagan came up for reelection in 1984, he not only won a second term, he defeated Democrat Walter Mondale in one of the most overwhelming landslides in U.S. history. Reagan won 55.8 percent of the vote to Mondale’s 38.5 percent, as History Central records.