Chart of the Week: Trump is not popular

The president’s approval rating is the lowest of any president at this point in their term

I am intending the Chart of the Week newsletter to be a quick reaction to recent news, a picture worth 1,000 words on the past seven days of headlines. This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to effectively dissolve the Department of Education, which is underwater among voters by 30 points. And his surrogates have started a campaign against the “activist judges” ruling against the administration’s various overreaches of executive power. Meanwhile, three-fourths of Americans say Trump should follow the rulings of the judiciary.

So for today’s COTW, I thought I should take a look at how Americans feel about Trump, and compare it to how they have felt about past presidents at this point in their terms. Is all this unpopular stuff affecting how Americans view the president? Is he below the two-month historical baseline? Or are we so polarized that nothing matters? Let’s load up the data and take a look. ( *P.S.,*I update the charts in this post daily, with fresh versions published on the data portal.)

First up, here is what Trump’s approval rating looks like today. As of 4:00 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 21, nearly a majority of adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the job of president (at 49.7%), whereas 46.9% of adults (coincidentally almost identical to the share of the vote he got in 2016) say they approve of what he’s doing. That means Trump is rounding to a -3 net approval rating (the percentage of people saying they approve of his performance minus the percent who disapprove).

Although public opinion on Trump has been slow to move before, today, the fact he is underwater is a product both a loss of support in his approve category as well as a consolidation of undecided adults into the disapprove category. The fence-sitters have mostly jumped off and sided against the president, while his support has softened.

But is -3 all that bad? If 47% of people support him, perhaps the administration will still feel emboldened to pursue Trump’s agenda. We can look at historical ratings to get a good baseline for where a president should be just two months into their term. Here is Trump’s net rating today compared to the net ratings for each 21st-century president over the first six months of their terms:

Two things stand out in this comparison:

1. Yes, -3 is in fact bad. Trump is less popular than his direct historical comparisons, even less popular than Joe Biden (at +17 net approval!) was at this point in his term. And, even worse, when I look at all the approval polling conducted since 1953, Trump is less popular than every one of his predecessors — except for his own negative rating 60 days into his term in March 2017.
2. The trend for Trump is about as negative as it was in his first term. Although the president started higher, at +9 net approval instead of +5 in 2017, this time around, he has lost support about as quickly as he did last time around. At this point in his first term, Trump was at -7, only slightly worse than today’s -3 rating.

COTW is supposed to be a quick chart-driventake, so I won’t dwell on this for long, but we can stipulate that Trump’s loss of support is due to several primary factors:

First, there’s the sinking stock market, which has posted its sharpest year-to-date decline for a presidential inauguration year since 2001. There’s also all the stuff he’s doing, which is mostly unpopular with voters. The potential cuts to Medicaid and Social Security are also borderline toxic with the group of voters most likely to attend constituency town halls: seniors. And finally, there’s the Elon Musk of it all. The billionaire tech CEO has been on every news outlet constantly for the last two months, but he’s one of the few Republican figures with worse personal favorability ratings than Trump. It’s possible some of those negatives are rubbing off on the president.

So, no, Trump is not popular, his policy agenda is not inevitable, and he has no “ mandate.” At this point the president is only overperforming the historical low he previously set in 2017. That is not good company, at least in terms of future electoral implications.

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