I have no idea whether President Trump enjoyed the holidays. But it looks like they may have helped his approval rating, at least temporarily.
In all three major poll aggregators—RealClearPolitics, FiveThirtyEight and the HuffPost Pollster—Trump’s approval rating has increased significantly over the last few weeks. On December 15, Trump’s approval was 37.2, 37.6, and 36.5 percent according to RealClearPolitics, The HuffPost Pollster and FiveThirtyEight respectively (note that I’m looking at the “all polls” statistic in FiveThirtyEight and using moderate smoothing for the HuffPost). As of Monday afternoon, those aggregates showed Trump’s approval rating at 39.8, 41.1, and 38.7 percent respectively.
In other words, multiple different aggregators with different methodologies tell similar stories: Over the last few weeks, Trump’s approval has ticked up a couple of percentage points.
The best explanation for this movement might be the holidays.
It’s hard to imagine that the biggest political events of the last few weeks helped Trump. On December 12, Doug Jones, a Democrat, won a Senate seat in Alabama over Trump-endorsed Republican Roy Moore. Republicans passed a major tax reform bill, but that bill polled poorly and Trump’s approval rating typically drops when he pushes unpopular policy.
But it’s not hard to imagine that voters would feel slightly better about politics over the holidays. That would fit within another broader theory—that Trump’s approval tends to improve when he’s out of the spotlight (note that I haven’t tested this theory rigorously and I’m not the first analyst to posit it).
It’s not hard to justify this theory intuitively. The economy seems to be doing reasonably well (and Trump’s approval rating on the economy is higher than his overall approval) and the daily news isn’t being consumed by unpopular foreign wars, yet Trump is historically unpopular. It’s possible that when Americans don’t see Trump pushing an unpopular policy or tweeting insults at someone (and when time with friends and family has puts them in a generally better mood) they feel better about politics.
This would also be consistent with yesterday’s Gallup poll, which showed Trump’s approval ticking down as the holiday season winds down and day-to-day political news picks up again.
So does this holiday bounce matter?
In the grand scheme of things, probably not. I don’t know what future polls will say, but it’s possible to imagine them following Gallup’s lead and at least partially erasing his holiday bounce. And even if Trump’s numbers stay up for a while, there’s still more than 10 months until the 2018 elections—enough time for his poll numbers to move up or down by a significant amount.
But it’s worth noting that seemingly modest bounces can, if they represent real swings and happen at the right time, have a real effect on elections. I used the simulator Sean Trende and I worked on to simulate how well various Republicans would do if Trump had a 38 percent approval rating on Election Day 2018 compared to a 42 percent approval rating. At a 42 percent approval rating, Republicans would have a 29 percent chance of holding Arizona, a 19 percent chance of unseating Claire McCaskill in Missouri, a 30 percent chance of re-electing Dean Heller in Nevada, and a 28 percent chance of unseating Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in Montana. But at a 38 percent approval rating, Republican win probabilities in each of those states is less than half of what they would be at 42 percent.
These results are just estimates, and cutting a relatively small probability in half is different than cutting a large one in half (e.g., a race that goes from goes from having a 98 percent probability of a Republican win to a 49 percent probability is seeing a bigger change than a race that goes from a 2 percent chance of a Republican win to a 1 percent chance). And Trump has had trouble hitting numbers like 42 percent in the RealClearPolitics average in recent months.
But the point here is that there are gradations to Trump’s unpopularity—and small improvements or declines in his popularity could have a real effect on the 2018 landscape.
