It’s easy to get the impression that Trump’s supporters will stand by him no matter what he says or does, no matter how crazy his rants are, no matter how childish and incompetent he turns out to be.
Fortunately, the numbers tell a different story.
FiveThirtyEight keeps track of the President’s approval and disapproval ratings using a statistical model that looks at a lot of different polls. Here’s what it shows right now:
37% approval rating, 57.5% disapproval. As for the trend, you can’t tell from that screenshot (which covers a fairly short time span), but approval has been dropping slowly but steadily ever since he took office. 37% is the lowest it’s ever been.
And in fact, when you dig deeper, the data gets even more hopeful.
In other words, Trump approvers are split almost equally between strong and weak support — but Trump disapprovers overwhelmingly feel strongly about it. So Trump is actually doing worse than a 37% approval rating might suggest.
“May you live in interesting times.”
Brian D. Buckley 