According to the RealClearPolitics average, 42.2 percent of poll respondents approve of Trump’s job performance. FiveThirtyEight has Trump’s approval rating at 42.5 percent among voters and HuffPost Pollster has him at 41.6 percent. And in all three of these aggregators, the basic story is the same–Trump’s approval rating has recently been climbing.
The president is still unpopular by historical standards–every other president that we have public polling for was more popular at this point in their first term than Trump is now. But his recent trend is upward. According to RCP and the FiveThirtyEight voter model, the president hasn’t been this popular since mid-May, when the GOP was just starting to take a hit from pushing an unpopular Affordable Care Act replacement.
So why is Trump’s approval rating improving? And does this uptick matter when we zoom out and start to think about the midterms and our understanding of the modern GOP?
The best explanation for Trump’s upswing (offered by me and other analysts last week) is a combination of relative silence, economics, and tax reform. Specifically, Trump has been quieter in the past month than he’s been in other stretches of his presidency, and that silence may have allowed good economic news to start lifting his numbers.
In January and early February, a combination of the brief government shutdown, the Nunes memo, the State of the Union and some, well, Trumpian remarks have eaten up a significant amount of political news coverage. But it’s not clear that any of these events had a lasting effect on public opinion. Historically, government shutdowns and State of the Union speeches haven’t left a lasting mark on the president’s poll numbers. I haven’t seen much polling on the Nunes memo, but voters have often split on partisan lines when polled about investigations into Trump and Russia. And if you’ve been paying attention to politics for the last two and a half years, you probably weren’t surprised by some of Trump’s remarks about immigration and other countries.
In other words, most of the events of the beginning of the year likely haven’t changed anyone’s views of Trump dramatically. It’s not hard to imagine that the tax reform bill (which has become more popular since it was passed) may have brought some skeptical Republicans back into the fold. And more generally, some voters may be giving Trump credit for the solid state of the economy.
The polling illustrates one of the key tradeoffs that Trump faces in regard to the upcoming midterms.
If Trump phoned it in for the next nine months–keeping a lower cultural profile and passing some laws but nothing that polled as badly as the various ACA replacements while benefiting from a solid economy–he might be able to sustain or build on his gains in the polls. If Trump could sustain an approval rating in the mid-40s into Election Day and hold Democrats to only a several point advantage in the House generic ballot, Republicans would stand a decent chance of retaining control of the lower chamber. Obviously that’s not a guaranteed. The president’s approval rating isn’t entirely under his control (e.g. economic downturns are often unpredictable and politically important), and it’s possible to imagine scenarios where Democrats manage to narrowly take the House against a more-popular-but-still-unpopular Trump. But the GOP might be more able to mitigate its losses if Trump didn’t pick as many cultural fights and didn’t try to pass high-profile, unpopular legislation.
But if Trump phoned it in for the next few months, the GOP would lose significant opportunities to enact their preferred policies. After the 2016 election, Sean Trende and I calculated that the GOP had more political power then than it had at any time since the 1928. Regardless of whether Republicans hold onto the House (and I don’t think they’re favored to), they’ll likely lose some seats in the lower chamber as well as some governorships and state legislative seats. In other words, if the GOP wants to pass major laws this is a good opportunity for them to try to do so. But they may, like the 2010 Democrats and many parties before them, pay a political price.
Obviously this isn’t an exhaustive list of all possible scenarios. Maybe the GOP will take a completely different legislative strategy and try to pass more popular legislation or push through many smaller pieces of legislation. Maybe Trump will upend this whole calculus by going to war with North Korea. Or maybe he’ll start picking unpopular cultural fights again, become less popular and by extension make it more difficult for the congressional GOP to pass legislation.
The point here isn’t to make a prediction. It’s to show that Trump’s uptick in approval in January appeared to be (and there are caveats about partisan nonresponse) a response to choices he and the GOP more broadly made. And both the results of the midterms and the shape of U.S. domestic policy will partially depend on the choices the GOP makes this year.
