We do, of course, get obsessed with the day-to-day movement in approval polls and the presidential preference polls. This is especially the case in the strange case of the Orangutan. We watch and hope and hope and watch, looking for the next tenth of a point drop in the old toddler’s numbers. I confess to my personal obsession — those numbers are the first thing I look at in the morning and the last thing I look at in the afternoon. The talking heads have become pretty much useless as the numbers will speak for themselves.
In my personal obsession, I’ve been watching the 538 aggregated “How Popular/Unpopular is Donald Trump” column. The aggregation helps not casting about looking for individual numbers, that’s for sure. And, while the Orangutan’s numbers are getting worse, one of 538’s additional features in that column is comparisons with previous (real) presidents. A coupla things pop out:
1. While the Orangutan is close to the one-termer Bush and Carter in net approval on day 1251, he’s 13.5 points behind Shrub and 15 behind Obama, and those are the close ones. For the rest since 1972, the Orange Nightmare is 31.9 back of Clinton, 36.1 behind Reagan and 45.2 behind Nixon on the same days of their presidencies. The difference between one-termers and two-timers is not subtle.
2. The 538 feature also includes numbers through 4 and 8 years (for those who won the second 4). Those lines show something I didn’t expect — that the negative numbers for one-termers started to REALLY crater about this time in the cycle. HW went from -19.6 on day 1251 (June 24) to a low of -31.8 on day 1299 (August 11), popped all the way up to -14 on day 1322 (September 4) and went back down after that. Carter went from -2.7 on day 1212 (May 7), to -10.7 on day 1218 (May 13), the same as the Orangutan, to -26.1 on day 1264 (July 7) and never really moved much from there. It seems (from 2 cases — woot) that the cake is baked on approval by mid-June of an incumbent presidential election year.
Surely, events of the day affected those numbers, such as HW’s recession and loss of goodwill amongst Rs for reneging on “No New Taxes”, and the Iran Hostage affair in Carter’s summer of disaster. How do those stack up with pandemic failure (no double entendre intended...maybe), economic failure, international relationships failures, etc? The Orangutan’s done some things he said he would and even those have been failures — Iran, Paris, tax cut, NATO — and the hits just keep on coming.
But I think I see another factor at play in numbers cratering to one-termer levels: the prospect of an alternative on the horizon and America’s distaste for losers. By June of an election year, very few people are really not thinking about the election. The election is no longer a long way off, opposition candidates have crystallized in name and begun to crystallize in terms of image, and certainly in terms of contrast. Knowledge of the incumbent is completely solidified and, for the one-termers, being seen as a loser becomes a real orbit of the drain.
Seeing what has happened before, I would not be surprised to see the Orangutan lose another 10 points in net approval by mid-August, bottoming around -24 or so. I’d guess there will be some rally back between then and election day, but ultimately a majority (or should I say, a large-enough majority) of Americans will have seen enough to simply go for the alternative Joe.
One can only hope that this scenario proceeds without too much additional damage to our beloved country. With support that low, denial is impossible and desperate acts become possibly too much for even Rs to excuse as voters and as officials. A reining-in may be in front of us.
Ok, that last sentence is beyond wishful thinking.
But the Orangutan is Toast, to mix a metaphor like a martini.
By the way, for those who might be offended by using orangutan as a pejorative term — I like orangutans a lot, but I don’t want one as POTUS.