Donald Trump is very unpopular in states that he has barely gained

The historical unpopularity of Donald Trump has yet to harden in conventional wisdom, even though he has dragged the previous presidents into approval At almost every point in his administration, traditional experts and journalists focus on his relatively high scores with Republican voters, convinced that this gives an insight into his political position. Is not completely unreasonable, without the Republican unity, Trump would have lost the election.The moment when GOP voters break with the president is the moment he is undeniably in trouble. political role.

But it is also a truism: by the time a president loses his base, that's the moment he has problems. A better measure, especially for the winner of a tight election like Donald Trump, is the performance with more marginal supporters: people who were not typical Republican voters, who did not like Trump himself, but who chose him rather than a democrat. and provisional reasons. These are voters who liked Trump's message about jobs and trade, and ignored his rude and inflammatory rhetoric voters who wanted a generic change in the White House, and thought Trump could deliver.

We know that these voters were disproportionately white and less likely to have a college degree. And we know that they were concentrated in the industrial Midwest, where Trump made spectacular gains over previous Republican presidential candidates. The latest national poll of Marist and NBC News questions many of these states, giving us a glimpse of the president's popularity with voters that he must hold to win a second term. The photo is not great.

In Michigan, where Trump won 11,000 votes, 54% of registered voters disapprove of his performance, against 36% who approve it. In Minnesota, where it has narrowly lost, 51% of them currently disapprove, against 38% who approve. And in Wisconsin, a state that he won by 23,000 votes, 52% disapprove, as against 36 who approve.

By wide margins, the voters of these states want a democratic congress. They want Congress to act as a "check and balance" on Trump. Despite the growth of the economy, few attribute to it the merit of economic improvement and, by 2020, nearly two-thirds in each state say that it's time to "Give a chance to a new person" in the White House.

Trump's unpopularity, on a national scale, and the growing advantage of Democrats on the Congressional Generic Bulletin, did not make a substantive difference in the way the President is covered. Part of this reflects how his most visible supporters – white workers, blue-collar workers – are used to symbolize an authentic "Americanness" that then colors Trump's perceptions. If he wins these most American Americans, then perhaps he's still channeling the popular will in an imperceptible, invisible way. Similarly, part of this reflects the shock of the 2016 election: even those that Trump could have won did not believe it, which caused a crisis in the world. epistemology when he did it. If we were wrong then, ignoring his appeal to millions of Americans, we may be wrong now.

But the 2016 lesson is not to ignore the polls; it is to pay more attention to what they actually say. On the eve of the elections, they were more and more in favor of Trump. As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight wrote at the time, "the possibility of an electoral college electoral vote sharing keeps widening our forecasts."

What are the polls saying now? This Trump, and his party, are in serious political danger.