I have wondered about this too, checking every now and then those composite polls over the course of the past almost 4 years:
“It’s really remarkable,” says Jennifer Victor, a political scientist at George Mason University. “The stability of Trump’s numbers are almost unbelievable.”
And Ezra Klein writes a great article about it: www.vox.com/…
You would expect that the 1-year approval ratings of a president who during that year was impeached by the House of Representatives; who allowed more than 185,000 Americans to die of COVID-19; under whose watch the unemployment rate rose from 3.7 percent to 10.2 percent; after an estimated 12 million people lost health insurance coverage; after Trump pardoned Roger Stone, who was facing jail time for dirty tricks on the president’s behalf; and after George Floyd’s murder sparked a nationwide movement protesting for racial justice — to which officials responded by tear-gassing demonstrators in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, so the president could pose for a photograph holding a Bible, would fall at least 20%.
Not so.
The people who do not approve of him will not change their minds:
When Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California Irvine, tries to explain “the amazing stability of Trump’s approval” in his classes, he starts with a question. He asks his students if there’s anything Trump could do to make them support him. And he’s invariably met by a sea of shaking heads.
The people who support Trump will not change their minds:
“If you see Trump as ‘the protector of Western Civilization,’ as Charlie Kirk called him the other night at the RNC, or the protector of white America, as Desmond King and Rogers Smith have called him, defending cherished (white Christian) American values from atheist, left-wing socialists who want to take your guns and put Cory Booker in charge of diversifying your neighborhoods, then there’s almost nothing that would make you abandon him,” Tesler continues.
Ezra argues that although we are all partisans, some of us are Americans before anything, but it seems the Trump effect is too strong for his supporters. On the other hand, he also argues that many world leaders received a bounce in their poll numbers because of their handling of the pandemic, from 5 points for France’s Emmanuel Macron to 25 points for Australia’s Scott Morrison. Trump received no bounce.
It is also an eery reflection to consider that if Trump wins, it will be fine with about 40% of Americans who accept his cheating and dictator/mob style government or disbelieve he cheats or may become a dictator. We have seen this before in history, this kind of populism and nationalistic support for an unhinged dedicator.
in the November 1932 election, the Nazis did not do as well as Hitler had hoped. In spite of massive violence and voter intimidation, the Nazis won only 43.9% of the vote, rather than the majority that he had expected. But Germany did not use a system of “Electoral College”, and yet… Hitler happened. en.wikipedia.org/...
