Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.
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WHAT’S WITH TRUMP’S POLLS? At this moment, Joe Biden has an eight-point lead over President Trump in head-to-head presidential polls. That’s a big but not insurmountable margin. At this point in the 2016 race, Hillary Clinton had a 4.5-point lead over Trump, 43.7 percent to 39.2 percent, in the RCP average. By August, 2016, Clinton’s lead expanded to 7.9 points, roughly equal to Biden’s today. And of course, the election did not go her way.
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But today Trump has something he did not have in 2016: A job approval rating. Right now, it is at 42.1 in the RCP average. That is slightly more than five points down from Trump’s presidency-high approval rating of 47.4 percent on April 1. For Trump, whose job approval numbers have bounced around in a pretty narrow range for all of his presidency — never higher than around 47 percent and never lower than around 37 percent — he is in a very middling place.
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Job approval is an important — not perfect, but important — predictor of presidential re-election fortunes. According to Gallup, the two presidents in the last half-century who had ratings below 40 percent in June of their re-election year have both lost. That would be Jimmy Carter, whose job approval rating was 32 percent in June 1980, and George H.W. Bush, whose rating was 37 percent in June 1992.
Another president, Gerald Ford, had a 45 percent rating in June 1976 and lost his bid for election. But he was admittedly an odd case — an unelected vice president who became an unelected president in the Watergate scandal.
Of the presidents who have won re-election, Barack Obama did it with a 46 percent job approval rating in June 2012. George W. Bush did it with 49 percent in 2004. Bill Clinton did it with 55 percent in 1996. But the important thing to remember is that Obama’s rating had climbed to 52 percent just before election day in 2012. Bush’s actually tipped down a point, to 48 percent, before election day in 2004. And Clinton’s inched down to 54 percent in 1996.
All of those ratings are higher than Donald Trump has had at any point in his presidency. Of course, Trump is unusual. He had a personal disapproval rating of nearly 60 percent on the day he was elected president. So this time around, he might win by either 1) rising in the polls, or 2) again confounding predictions based on polls. Or he might not.
Trump supporters reject polls completely and wonder why anyone in his right mind would ever pay any attention to any poll. They’ll dismiss this edition of the newsletter as irrelevant. But job approval has always been an important indicator of presidential fortunes. It will be for Trump, too.
