Gallup released new polling this week showing the percentage of Americans who think Donald Trump deserves re-election, 37 percent, tracks almost identically to where Barack Obama (37 percent) and Bill Clinton (38 percent) stood at this point—and that's a good thing in terms of Democrats gaining seats this November.
Clinton and Obama both saw their party suffer huge losses in their first midterm elections, when fewer than four in 10 voters thought they deserved re-election. In 1994, Democrats lost 53 seats in the House, and in 2010, they lost 63 seats. Those losses were large enough to make Republicans the majority party in the House of Representatives.
George W. Bush comparisons are useless because his re-elect numbers were off the charts (60 percent) due to a post-9/11 bump.
Democrats still have the hurdle of heavily gerrymandered districts to overcome this fall. But there's one more way Trump could help them: He continues to be far more deeply unpopular than either Obama or Clinton at this juncture, notes the Washington Post's Greg Sargent:
What’s more, as Gallup reminds us today, if you look at Trump’s approval ratings, as opposed to the reelect numbers, those have steadily been worse than those of his recent predecessors — by sizable margins, in fact. So not only is Trump on track to face large midterm losses — he is also substantially less popular than those predecessors.
As of mid-April, Gallup put Trump's favorability ratings at the lowest point of his presidency: 38 percent.
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