Mediaboss Marketing

Ad will collapse in seconds CLOSE February 21, 2017 02/21/2017 1:40 p.m. By Ed Kilgore

Share

Do you wonder why Donald Trump thinks hes wildly popular beyond the nefarious precincts of those enemies of the people, the liberal news media? The president himself offered a succinct talking point on that subject near the beginning of his very non-succinct February 16 press conference.

True to form, Trump cherry-picked the most favorable polling data available, and ignored the rest. But he could not do that short of just, well, making stuff up, which is always an option for him if it were not for an unusually wide range of findings in the polling universe about public attitudes toward the 45th presidents job performance so far.

As Nate Silver notes, Trumps recent approval ratings vary from a high of 55 percent (with 45 percent disapproval) in the aforementioned Rasmussen poll to a low of 39 percent (with 56 percent disapproval) in a survey from Pew Research. The differences are most likely the result of a combination of sampling and survey techniques. Trump consistently does better with narrower samples. Rasmussen claims to be measuring likely voters, even though we are more than a year and a half away from the next national election. Pew is sampling all adults, a significantly larger universe than those who will ultimately vote in that next election. Rasmussen is also famously a robo-pollster, which means hes only reaching the half of the electorate that has land lines. Pew utilizes a traditional live-interview methodology, which is generally thought to be more accurate, but that some theorize can be misleading with respect to highly controversial politicians like Trump. (This is the shy Trump voter theory.)

While polls like Rasmussens have a poor reputation and polls like Pews are considered closer to the gold standard (FiveThirtyEights pollster ratings give Raz a C+ and Pew a B+), we are in a period of great uncertainty about polling quality. And as it happens, the final 2016 national poll from Rasmussen pretty much nailed Clintons popular-vote margin over Trump, while the final Pew poll (conducted two weeks out, to be fair) showed Clinton up by six points.

So with all this confusion, is Trump justified in just citing whichever polling results he wants? No, not really. Most observers who are interested in approximating the truth go with polling averages. At the moment, RealClearPolitics average of recent polls places Trumps job approval ratio at 45/51. Its also important to pay attention to trends. As it happens, since Trump bragged about his Rasmussen numbers, his approval ratio in that tracking poll has deteriorated from 55/45 to 50/50, the worst ratio of his brief administration.

It is an entirely different question how much these numbers matter as a predictor of the next election. While the party of the president almost always loses House seats and more often than not loses Senate and gubernatorial seats in midterms, and less popular presidents usually lose more than popular presidents, variations in the landscape can make it very tricky to lay odds. The Senate landscape in 2018 is insanely pro-Republican. GOP control of the upper chamber could very well survive even a Democratic electoral tsunami. Since all House seats are up in 2018, GOP control there is significantly more vulnerable, but thanks to gerrymandering and superior efficiency in the distribution of voters, Democrats will have an uphill battle to win the net 24 seats necessary for a flip in control and with it the ability to thwart the Trump/GOP agenda. Nate Cohn appears to think its too much of a reach even if Trumps approval ratings stay roughly where they are today.

In 2006 and 2010, Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama had approval ratings near or above 40 percent on Election Day. So if you had to make a rough guess, you would probably say that Mr. Trumps approval rating would probably need to be even lower for House control to become a true tossup.

So while it is hard to deny that Trump is amazingly unpopular for a new president, unless his approval ratings trend farther down the way even those of popular presidents typically do, his party may not suffer the kind of humiliation Democrats experienced in 2010. For all the shock Trump has consistently inspired with his behavior as president, theres not much objective reason for Republican politicians to panic and begin abandoning him based on his current public standing. But in this as in so many other respects, we are talking about an unprecedented chief executive, so the collapse some in the media and the Democratic Party perceive as already underway could yet arrive.

What, Exactly, Are Melania and Ivanka Trump Trying to Sell?

The Bachelor Recap: No Place Like Home

Roxane Gay Calls Out Simon & Schuster After They Drop Milo Yiannopoulos

John McCain the Republican vs. John McCain the Patriot

Donald Trump, Pseudoauthoritarian

Lets Baselessly Speculate About the First Photo From the Star Wars Han Solo Movie

The White House Mole

The Supreme-Branded Metrocard Is Here

Cate Blanchett Lip-Synced You Dont Own Me at a Drag Show, Giving the People Exactly What They Want

The Single Guy Whos Pretty Sure He Split the Bill

Most Popular Video On Daily Intelligencer

The protesters, the new frisson, and the extremely clean floors.

While scores of GOP lawmakers are avoiding their constituents, a handful attended packed public events back home.

They were released just as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly headed south.

The American tourism industry is still reeling from Trumps travel ban.

Challenging Trumps travel ban.

Trump has an opportunity to lay out a detailed policy agenda on February 28 to a joint session of Congress which needs the guidance. But will he?

Maybe the plan is to deport millions, or frighten the undocumented into self-deporting. Either way, a big shift in immigration policy is underway.

Authorities are awaiting lab results while North Korea accuses Malaysia of mangling the autopsy.

Are Trumps historically low approval ratings high enough for Republicans to avoid a 2018 disaster? Probably so, but theres not much room for error.

The president is poised to pay for his tax cuts by baselessly assuming 3 percent economic growth and eliminating public broadcasting.

Assessing the not-so-great dictator one month into his tenure.

Finally abandoning a habit of attacking reporters who asked him about anti-Semitic incidents, Trump simply addressed the subject appropriately.

No one suffered life-threatening injuries.

Patriots shun the White House. Sports stars turn ESPN into MSNBC. And brands smell the commercial potential in political rage.

It took the TSA two hours to report the accidental security breach to Port Authority police.

Ivanka Trump and the White House issued statements, but the president has not discussed the incidents specifically.

The company is moving fast following harassment allegations from a former employee.

The silly-sign makers were out in full force on Monday.

He was previously in charge of designing the Army of the future.

The right-wing provocateur came under fire for a video in which he defends relationships between younger boys and older men.

Read the rest here:
Trump Is Unpopular, But Not As Unpopular As Liberals Think - New York Magazine