Donald Trump is beating Congressional Republicans in the polls. And that’s not necessarily great news for either of them.
This graphic displays data from nearly every generic ballot poll tracked by RealClearPolitics. (I had to remove a few polls because it appeared as if approval ratings didn’t match.) Each point is a poll, and they run chronologically left to right. The bottom axis is number of days between inauguration and the middle of the polling period.
Points that are above zero (the dotted line) represent polls where Trump’s job approval was higher than the GOP’s percentage in the generic ballot. And points below the line represent polls where Trump’s approval rating was a lower than the Republican’s share of the vote.
Most polls are above the zero line—indicating that Trump is outperforming congressional Republicans in more than half of the polls. On average, Trump outperforms Republicans by about 4 points, though the polls do vary around that average.
Trump loyalists might see this trend in a positive light—maybe the president is outperforming his party because he understands something they don’t! But I don’t think that’s the right interpretation.
It’s bad news for the president because he’s still historically unpopular and he’s only ahead of the GOP by a few points. If Trump remains this unpopular, Republicans might have trouble passing major legislation and holding the House.
And it’s also bad news for Trump-neutral or Trump-skeptical Republicans who are more sympathetic to congressional Republicans—because it signals that House Republicans are tied to Trump, and that drops in his approval rating might translate to a lower ceiling for them in November.
But it’s great news for Democrats. They need to win the House popular vote by about 7 points to take the chamber, and low support for Republicans is helping Democrats get to roughly that level in generic ballot polls. There’s a significant margin of error in that 7-point estimate and the generic ballot poll average is (like every statistic) imperfect. But it’s safe to say that Trump’s unpopularity is part of the reason the race for control of the lower chamber is a close to a toss-up.
I’ve tracked these quantities before—both in historical data and during the Trump era – and the president’s close ties to the GOP fit with the broader historical pattern. In 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2014 the president’s party had trouble pulling away from his approval rating in generic ballot polls.
This illustrates a basic fact about modern politics—the president is the central figure. And as long as he’s unpopular, the broader GOP will likely continue to have problems.
