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For nearly four years, Trump’s approval ratings have been extraordinarily stable, ranging from 30s to 40s. Trump’s denial of election results and the sacking of the Capitol, however, did what an unsuccessful effort to repeal Obamacare, white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, impeachment and other scandals could not : erode its durable support to new troughs.
Trump’s slip means he will leave the Oval Office historically unpopular compared to most of his predecessors. Instead of coming out as a popular figure, Trump is set to join George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon as presidents who have stepped out with sizable majorities disapproving of their professional performances.
Already almost universally despised by Democratic voters, much of Trump’s drop in polls has come from Republicans and Independents. Three in four self-identified GOP voters still approve of Trump’s job as president – 75% – but that’s down from 83% in the latest POLITICO / Morning Consult poll of 2020, conducted in December.
The decline among independents was similar: fewer than three in 10 independent voters now approve of Trump – 29%, down from 38% in December.
The POLITICO / Morning Consult poll was conducted Jan. 8-11, as Congress prepared to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump. The poll surveyed 1,996 registered voters online. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The same survey, in published results earlier this week, voters were divided over whether Congress should initiate impeachment proceedings in the final week of Trump’s presidency.
Other polls taken since the violent insurgency on Capitol Hill last week also show declining approval ratings for Trump. In one Quinnipiac University survey On Monday, only 33% of voters approved of Trump’s handling of his job as president, down from 44% a month earlier. A PBS NewsHour / Marist College Poll, conducted the day after the attack on Capitol Hill, showed Trump’s approval rating among all Americans to be 38%, down 5 points from December.
Granted, national polls underestimated Trump’s performance in the national election, which he lost by 4 percentage points after falling behind the RealClearPolitics average by 7 points and the FiveThirtyEight average by 8 points.
But the latest polls conducted over the past week all show a significant drop in support for Trump from previous measures – with one notable exception: the Rasmussen reports. The Republican-leaning automated pollster, which has generally produced better results for Trump, showed that the president’s approval ratings were hardly affected by the events of the past week. (Rasmussen’s Twitter account has, over the past month, shared some of the discredited election conspiracies that fueled pro-Trump protests last week, including one that sadly cited Soviet despot Joseph Stalin.)
Trump’s final approval rating is far from settled, given Congress’ sprint to impeach him in the closing week of his presidency. But he is set to become one of the most unpopular presidents when he steps down.
Barack Obama’s approval rating rose in the final weeks of his presidency, following Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 election. Average RealClearPoliticsObama’s approval rating finished at 57%, increasing by about 5 points between the election and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.
Trump is expected to finish closer to Bush’s final marks: 34% in final Gallup poll – the best all-time record for modern presidential approval – and 29% at closing Average RealClearPolitics.
But Bush’s father George HW Bush, the last president to be ousted by voters after a term in office, bounced back from the election in a way that Trump did not. Elder Bush’s approval rating rose to 32% as the 1992 election approached, according to Gallup, but finished at 56% in the final poll before Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
Clinton and Ronald Reagan both finished with 63% approval ratings in the Gallup poll. Trump’s presidency ends more like Carter’s: The Georgian’s final approval rating before handing over the Oval Office to Reagan was 34%.
No president has left office more unpopular than Nixon, who had a 24 percent approval rating in the last Gallup poll before his resignation in August 1974. But rank and file Republicans had turned Nixon more than they did. ‘did on Trump. In this latest Gallup poll, 38% of Republicans disapproved of Nixon’s professional performance, compared to 23% who disapproved of Trump in the new POLITICO / Morning Consult poll.
Morning Consult is a global data intelligence company, providing real-time insight into what people think, surveying tens of thousands of people around the world every day..
More details on the survey and its methodology can be found in these two documents: Toplines | Cross tables
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