Peter Enns and Jonathon Schuldt conjectured that the partisan nature of most voters leads them to be defensive regarding their party and their party’s elected officials or candidates. Therefore, they devised a clever way to obtain a more honest assessment of Thing from republicans: compare thing to past republicans.
So we (Enns and Schuldt) have worked to develop a hopefully more nuanced approach to measuring presidential approval, where we ask respondents how favorably they feel toward Trump relative to other notable Republicans. By not explicitly asking respondents whether they approve or disapprove of the president, we avoid forcing respondents to take sides, as they do in the standard presidential approval question. Instead, respondents from both parties evaluate Trump in comparison to other Republicans
As one might hope ( if one hopes that republicans are even remotely sane), thing does poorly in this assessment. Now, they note that Thing has the lowest approval rating of any president since Gerald Ford.
Not only is he the least popular president to run for reelection since Gerald Ford according to polls asking the standard presidential approval question, but in our measure, he is now also rated less favorably than his vice president. He’s also essentially tied with Palin for the least favorable Republican on our list,
For some reason, I feel like copying the phrase prior to the comma. I can’t quite put my figure on it . So, here it is again .
Not only is he the least popular president to run for reelection since Gerald Ford according to polls asking the standard presidential approval question
Now that I think about it, it’s probably because of how much I hate him and I feel utterly unable to adequately express how deeply, how much I hate this monstrosity, this thing. Yep, that’s why. Least popular since president to run for reelection since Gerald Ford. Less popular than George Herbert Walker Bush who lost reelection. And the others are overly kind in saying that, if you knew the economy was like this and didn’t know who the president was or anything else about him, you would anticipate that the president would have a much higher approval rating. That despite this apparently decent economy (that has more inequality in it than any economy since the 1920s) Trump has some terrible approval ratings tells us how Americans really feel about him and what would happen if the economy went south.
I am not rooting for the economy to go south. However, their economic philosophy which they have implemented is likely to cause it to enter into a recession (nevermind that it is unusual for the American economy to grow this many years in a row): they have reduced investment in and protection of the poor and the middle class, they initiated a trade war, they increased inequality, they increased the national debt and the deficit, they reduced regulations and they cut funds to the treasury. The small businesses that fuel job growth must be supported by the communities in which the small businesses reside and when the communities are struggling and, therefore, can’t support them, then these small businesses will fail as the billionaires are only going to do so much business at these small businesses. For these fundamental reasons, it appears to me that it is likely that the economy will go into a recession prior to the election. If that happens, Trump is absolutely done.
But the bottom line is that the president appears even more unpopular than previously thought, and more disliked than the standard presidential approval question is able to reveal.
Sunday, Jan 19, 2020 · 11:27:52 PM +00:00
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Dem
Southern Leveller gives us an important warning to prevent complacency — which we have no room for with the electoral college :
Good news, but here’s a warning from someone old enough to remember the election of 1976. Carter had a 15 pt. lead coming out of the DNC, but Ford engineered a smear campaign (the media eagerly played along) and closed that gap. It was a very close election—and Ford didn’t have Russian help or the cooperation of major social media like Facebook.
We MUST stay vigilant and engaged. For all his unpopularity, Trump could still win an Electoral College victory—just as he did in 2016.
Monday, Jan 20, 2020 · 3:54:38 AM +00:00
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Dem
My memory of his favorability is wrong: Trump’s favorability rating was 37.5 according to 538 at the time of his election. Favorability and approval rating are not the same thing. Voting one time for somebody with a low favorability is different than having lived under that person’s rule for four years. Hillary Clinton had been attacked and demonized by the right for 30 years unlike any of our present candidates. Comey intervened 10 days prior to the election and that was enough according to 538 to swing the election to Trump. Hillary still won 3 million more votes than Trump did. Nobody since Ford has held as low an approval rating as Trump has now and won reelection.