Trump’s approval numbers from 538 (37.5),RCP (38.6) and Pollster (39.6) can be found at the links. Gallup is at 36. Despite stabilization at end September, these are not good numbers, and there’s more data to consider:
Reuters:
Trump's popularity is slipping in rural America: poll
“Every president makes mistakes,” Wilson said. “But if you add one on top of one, on top of another one, on top of another, there’s just a limit.”
Trump, who inspired millions of supporters last year in places like Morgan County, has been losing his grip on rural America.
According to the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll, the Republican president’s popularity is eroding in small towns and rural communities where 15 percent of the country’s population lives. The poll of more than 15,000 adults in “non-metro” areas shows that they are now as likely to disapprove of Trump as they are to approve of him.
In September, 47 percent of people in non-metro areas approved of Trump while 47 percent disapproved. That is down from Trump’s first four weeks in office, when 55 percent said they approved of the president while 39 percent disapproved.
Morning Consult:
Trump Approval Dips in Every State, Though Deep Pockets of Support Remain
A comprehensive survey of more than 470,000 Americans finds Trump's approval has fallen in every state since taking office
Fewer than nine months into President Donald Trump’s White House tenure, a Morning Consult survey in all 50 states indicates that voters have grown bearish on his performance in office.
Trump has failed to improve his standing among the public anywhere — including the states he won handily as the Republican nominee during the 2016 presidential election, according to the online survey, which was based on interviews of 472,032 registered voters across each state and Washington, D.C., from Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration to Sept. 26.
Let’s have some more hot takes on how he will be reelected.
NY Times:
Why Big Cities Thrive, and Smaller Ones Are Being Left Behind
By now, most Americans live in big metropolitan clusters. Still, the stagnation of small cities is hardly inconsequential. In the presidential election last year, frustrated voters in metropolitan areas with fewer than 250,000 people chose President Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 57 percent to 38 percent, by one reckoning. Mr. Trump took 61 percent of rural voters and 52 percent of voters in midsize cities. This offset Mrs. Clinton’s advantage in America’s prosperous big cities in critical states.
The frustration that helped deliver the presidency tod Mr. Trump is a bad guide for policy. Mr. Trump’s promise to relieve their pain by reviving the coal and steel industries, by keeping immigrants out of the country and by raising barriers against manufactured imports is only a rhetorical balm to satisfy an angry base seeking to reclaim a prosperous past that is no longer available.
Norm Ornstein/Atlantic:
American Kakistocracy
From cabinet officials jetting around on the public dime, to Trump's shattering of ethical norms, to disregard for congressional procedure—there’s a case to be made that the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens.
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin Risk Their Reputations
Within the administration, there are real differences among how top officials have behaved and how they are perceived. Several — Tom Price, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer and Rex Tillerson — have badly sullied their standing with virtually everyone outside the administration. After long careers, they have turned themselves into punch lines.
The clearest exception is Jim Mattis, the defense secretary. Mattis has done so partly by avoiding scandal and minimizing conflicts with Trump. But he has also been careful to set his own ethical boundaries. Can you recall a single time when Mattis has said something outright untrue? I can’t. That’s how he has retained his dignity in the eyes of so many people.
Cohn and Mnuchin have started to risk theirs. This column is a plea to them: Please stop, for everyone’s sake, including yours.
Alexandra Petri/WaPo channels Bob Corker, in his own words if he were honest:
It’s like being in Caligula’s court, except Caligula’s court had nice sculptures and sometimes you got to hang out with a horse. It’s like being trapped in a Tudor novel. I can’t read “Wolf Hall”; my hands just start shaking and shaking.
This is not normal. This is not okay. And I am doing what it takes: giving an interview to a media outlet stating my concerns! And uh, no that’s, that’s sort of it, but that’s doing something, I feel. It’s still more than anyone else has done.
For too long, this has been an open secret that no one does anything about, but now it will just be an open — thing that no one does anything about.
That’s progress, I think.
Aaron Blake/WaPo discusses the DC hostages known as the GOP:
The GOP’s Trump-induced Stockholm syndrome
Politics is a business that rewards risk mitigation. Most lawmakers represent safe districts and states and only have to worry about tempting primary challengers. Thus, running afoul of Trump is an unnecessary risk. It's no coincidence that the most strident criticisms of Trump are now coming from a GOP senator who recently announced his retirement.
But until Trump's comments about Corker are viewed is crossing a line in the sand — until lawmakers treat Trump's broadsides against them as a point of no return when it comes to having their support — he has little reason to stop it. If he thinks he can just bring you back into the fold with the temptation of tax reform, it's never going to stop. If he can attack you and your family and then break bread with you on legislation, he has no reason to stop.
If this is indeed a negotiation, it's taking place between a hostage-taker and his compliant hostage.
So if this is all an open secret, if we all know Trump is incompetent and unfit, why does it take Bob Corker saying something to cover it? One explanation here, indexing, was pointed out to me by a helpful political scientist I know:
“Indexing” is a theory of news content and press-state relations first formulated as the “indexing hypothesis.” At its core, the indexing hypothesis predicts that news content on political and public policy issues will generally follow the parameters of elite debate: when political elites (such as the White House and congressional leaders) are in general agreement on an issue, news coverage of that issue will tend to reflect that consensus; when political elites disagree, news coverage will fall more or less within the contours of their disagreement. Put differently, those issues and views that are subject to high-level political debate are most likely to receive news attention that is wide-ranging; issues not subject to debate receive less critical attention.
Be it Iraq or Trump, DFH’s need not apply, until it’s conventional elite wisdom, anyway. But that’s why it’s important for Corker to speak out. That’s why it’s important for columnists to sometimes state the obvious. That’s what drives coverage of something everyone already knows.
And that’s what drove us to blog in the first place.