First lady Melania Trump’s favorable rating has taken a hit since she’s become more visible in recent weeks.
Her favorability has plummeted by 11 points since October, according to a new CNN poll released Thursday. She has a 43 percent favorability rating now, compared with a 54 percent rating in October.
It’s a big shift in support for the first lady, who has seen numbers in the high 40s to high 50s for much of the year. The new mark is still higher than her lowest polling numbers in January 2017, shortly before her husband was sworn in as president, when her favorability was 36 percent.
Her strongest support comes from older, white, male Republicans and conservatives, while women who are mainly young and college-educated hold a more negative view of the first lady. In the new poll, 36 percent found her unfavorable, a 6-point increase since CNN’s last poll in October.
Her popularity hit a high point in May — 57 percent — after planning the White House’s first state dinner in April. After kidney surgery, when she was not seen in public for weeks, her favorable ratings stood at 51 percent.
Trump has appeared more often in public in recent weeks, from accompanying her husband on his trip to Argentina for the G-20 summit to making one of her most high-profile speeches on the opioids epidemic at Liberty University in Virginia.
This week, she has visited the troops at military bases in Virginia and Washington, D.C., and read to patients at Children’s National Hospital, where she promoted her anti-bullying message. She’s also participated in a “Toys for Tots” holiday toy drive.
She flexed her independence in mid-November when she publicly called for the firing of a top aide to national security adviser John Bolton.
The poll, which surveyed 1,015 respondents, was conducted Dec. 6-9. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
