. . . was 46 percent on February 4, 2017, fifteen days after his inauguration. He never again reached that number . . .
. . . until today.
I am referring, as always, to the "President Trump Job Approval" at Real Clear Politics.
If President Trump's 46 percent job approval holds, would it insure his election? Who knows?
Depends on three factors:
The vagaries of the Electoral College system. President Trump's opposition is centered in New York and California. He is must stronger elsewhere, especially in mid-America (broadly defined).
Systematic undercounts of Trump supporters in national polls. Are Trump supporters, as a group, less likely to respond to polls? I suspect they are, both because they think pollsters, as a group, are biased against Mr. Trump and because it is increasingly difficult to identify genuine polls from politically inspired canvasses conducted by campaigns to identify their own supporters and undecideds who might be flipped. Technically, pollsters could identify this problem and account for it. But do they? Could these undercounts, if they exist, justify adding a point or two to Mr. Trump's number? I think yes.
Anti-Trump bias (in a technical, not a moral, sense) in polls of registered voters rather than likely voters. Almost all polls in the RCP average are of registered voters. This is not an anti-Trump plot; it's just a cheaper way to conduct polls. Polls of likely voters are believed to be more favorable to Republicans than polls of registered voters. I believe Mr. Trump will get another point or two closer to the election as polls of likely voters become more common.
President Trump's corresponding job-approval rating on February 20, 2012, was 48.6 percent -- 2.6 points higher than President Trump's current rating. Where his numbers goosed by polling bias? Possibly. Who would risk being called racist for telling a stranger on the telephone that he disapproves of America's first black president? And if polls of registered voters favor Democrats, did he benefit from this bias?
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