Phillip Bump’s article in The Washington Post, "A brief history of how America feels about Donald Trump,” turns out to be a treasure trove of compiled data sets showing a comprehensive overview of President Trump’s favoribility polls from the primaries and presidency.
These three graphs should provide useful resources for future posts. We can also see Trump seems to have lost all his increments to favorability beyond his hardcore base in the Republican Party. The big question is whether this tumultuous last two weeks will start to peel off from the base 35% to 40% who have remained loyal so far.
You’ll notice that at no point, save for a few individual days of favorability ratings, has Trump been above 50 percent. Trump’s favorability ratings ticked up after the election, but even so remained under 50 percent. His polling average in the primary was never above 50 percent, nor was it ever above 50 percent in the general. Trump was also the only candidate in the modern era of presidential primaries to win despite earning less than 50 percent of the vote in both the primary and the general.
Bump notes that Trump’s favoribilty comes almost entirely from Republicans.
The primary, though, was a different story. The Republican presidential primary has been the apex of Trump’s political strength so far, with a consistent national lead that powered him through the those contests (although often only narrowly). Put another way: Trump has only being doing well when the pool of people being considered consists only of Republicans.
We can already see that President Trump’s honeymoon period may be in jeapordy of an early drop. (Understatement humor alert!)
I recommend folks read the original article.
Saturday, Apr 1, 2017 · 7:46:28 PM +00:00 · HoundDog
Here is a shorter plot of what we more commonly see of Trump’s favoribles since becoming president, which misses the longer-term dynamics.
I pulled this from the image library. I'll see if I can find a larger version that is easier to read.