Donald Trump is enjoying his best poll numbers ever. His opponents may fume in frustration, but the public gives the U.S. president decent marks for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Here are four takeaways on what those poll numbers say, what they don’t, and what’s next.
Sorry to the haters, doubters and slack-jawed disbelievers: Donald Trump has the highest approval ratings of his presidency.
The barrage of criticism he’s faced in the media over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis does not erase the fact that he’s getting decent marks from the public.
He’s closer than ever to cracking the 50 per cent mark in public approval.
Trump took a pause Friday from dealing with this deadly, economy-pulverizing pandemic to tweet his thanks to a journalist who pointed out his poll numbers.
As the president often does, he insisted his real support must be much higher than what’s in the media. “Add 10 points!” he tweeted.
Needless to say, you can’t arbitrarily add 10 points to a survey and call it statistically sound. But here are a few things we can definitely glean from the polling so far.
Thank you Byron. Many polls are much better than this. If it is the Fake News @washingtonpost, add 10 points! https://t.co/H5kBKNukT5
Trump has more support than ever
Trump had a 47.3 per cent average approval rating, according to an aggregate of surveys compiled by the website Real Clear Politics. The closest he’s ever come to 50 per cent support was right after his inauguration in 2017.
Some surveys even show him with more public approval than disapproval for the first time, though most don’t.
Yet he’s still in political danger
Still, most polls show his ratings slightly underwater, with the Real Clear Politics average showing two per cent more disapprove of his leadership (49.3 per cent) than approve.
The other bad news for Trump involves the general election. He’s beaten his likely opponent, Joe Biden, just one time in 24 head-to-head national polls listed on the site this year.
Of course, U.S. elections are fought state by state. What the swing states show is a close race, with some challenges for the incumbent.
Trump has been a bit behind in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and a bit ahead in Florida. There’s less data from Ohio, and it’s mixed. An additional challenge for Trump is, entering this crisis, he was trailing Biden in the Republican-leaning states of Arizona and North Carolina.
There is another important point to be made, since any talk of U.S. presidential polling inevitably draws complaints that pollsters got it wrong in 2016, and Trump himself habitually claims his true support is much higher than published figures.
It’s this: the national polls were not wrong in 2016.
In fact, they were close to bang-on. The Real Clear Politics average missed the 2016 result by one percentage point. Same for Florida, and to a lesser extent in Pennsylvania.
But they were wrong where it mattered most in 2016: at the state level, in Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. Surveys in those key states were way off.
Leaders poll well in a crisis
Leaders are getting strong public support in this crisis — it’s happening throughout the U.S., and in lots of other places.
Look at the results from one Fox News poll. It asked respondents to rank the performance of various figures in the U.S. Everyone got good marks — and everyone else polled better than Trump.
Seventy-seven per cent approved of the job done by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health; local officials got 75 per cent; state governments 74 per cent; Vice-President Mike Pence 55 per cent; and Tr