A lot of Trump’s numbers in the latest Quinnipiac Poll look pretty bad. Then again, most of them don’t look much worse than usual.
Here’s how the poll’s assistant director describes his latest numbers:
“With only a slight bombing bump, President Donald Trump stays mired in miserable numbers. The first 100 days draw to a close with character flaws overwhelming his strongest traits, intelligence and strength as a person,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
Okay, that’s fair enough. But polls are taken serially, and most of the trend lines here don’t give a lot of hints about Trump’s success or failure in his first 100 days. For example:
1) Trump’s 39 percent approval rating, as miserable as it sounds, is a point higher than the 38 percent he enjoyed (or suffered) in the exit polls on Election Day in November. It’s not his highest number or anything (he has briefly hit the low 40s on a couple of occasions) but it’s also the same as what Quinnipiac found just after his inauguration. Contrary to the impression you might get from others’ daily tracking polls, his numbers seem to have been surprisingly stable.
2) As miserable as it sounds, the poll’s 33 percent satisfaction rate with “the way things are going in the nation today” is actually the highest (albeit within the margin of error) that Quinnipiac has recorded since last September, and significantly better than, say, last March, when it was 26 percent.
3) 58 percent of respondents say in this poll that the Trump is doing about as they’d expected, not really better or worse. This is as high as that number has gotten so far, and although it isn’t exactly a positive indicator, it at least suggests that Trump’s chaotic campaign has been successfully normalized in his presidency. People may still hate his guts, but they’re used to him by now.
4) Only 37 percent think that Trump is honest. That sounds terrible, but it actually hasn’t changed much, either. It was 42 percent right after his election and 34 percent last month.
One exception is that Americans do seem to have lost faith in Trump’s “leadership skills” — for three polls in a row, only 40 percent believe he has them, and 55 percent do not, almost the mirror image of the 56/38 split he enjoyed in Quinnipiac’s poll of November 22.
All the polls agree that Trump engenders very robust negative feelings in a lot of people. As he always has. But not much has changed since the election. He’s just an unpopular person, and he was even when he was elected.
For a person as chaotic, unpredictable, and personally poll-crazed as Trump, his numbers have been surprisingly stable through a lot of ups and downs — a Supreme Court appointment, two foreign bombings, the failure of his heathcare bill, and then of course all of the media-generated mini-controversies that dog his White House every day.
