For the past week, Trump’s approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average has hovered close to 42 percent. That’s an improvement from early March, when the average briefly dipped below 40 percent. FiveThirtyEight didn’t shift as much in that interval, but its aggregate shows that Trump gained about two points among voters since the beginning of the year.
Most of the time, a two-point bump in the president’s approval rating isn’t notable. Trump is still historically unpopular, and Democrats are, in my view, the favorites to take the House in November. But Trump’s recent bump is notable because he’s currently in a sort of bizarre Goldilocks zone. He’s not unpopular enough to guarantee a Democratic takeover in the House, and he’s far from popular enough to make a Republican hold certain.
This graphic (inspired by Philip Bump’s charts at the Washington Post) shows the RealClearPolitics average for Trump’s net approval rating and the Democratic Party’s net advantage in generic ballot polls (surveys that essentially ask a national sample of voters who they’ll vote for in the upcoming House elections). At first, changes in Trump’s approval don’t coincide with changes in the generic ballot. But as time goes on, the first line starts to look like a reflected image of the second and the Democratic margin in the generic ballot begins to track net presidential approval. This graphic—along with the clear connection between presidential approval and the incumbent party’s share in the generic ballot—suggest a strong connection between how popular the president is and his party’s midterm vote total in the House.
Other elections analysts have estimated that Democrats need to win the national House vote by about seven points (with a sizeable margin of error) in order to take back the lower chamber (Republicans can hold the House without while getting fewer total votes because of a combination of geography and gerrymandering). And for the last three weeks, the polls have been hovering within about a point of that seven-point advantage.
If the president were much less popular (if, say, his approval was at 31 percent) then there would be only a very small chance that Republicans would hold the House, and a two-point bump wouldn’t matter much. And if the president were much more popular (say, at a 53 percent approval rating), the GOP’s House majority might be safe regardless of whether Trump bumped his approval up another two points.
But the generic ballot is close to seven points. That makes Democrats the favorites to win the House in November, but it’s not a guarantee. So it’s worth keeping an eye on these relatively small movements. If one of them becomes permanent or comes at an inopportune time for Democrats, it could complicate their math in the House.
Trump’s approval rating doesn’t just matter because it helps us predict elections – it matters because it measures how real Americans think and feel about the president. So it’s worth asking exactly what caused Trump’s approval rating to rise.
Unlike some past jumps and bumps in Trump’s job approval, this one didn’t follow a new, dominant event or story. Over the past few weeks, political headlines have been a mix of the Mueller investigations, Cabinet changes, continued anti-gun protests, Stormy Daniels, Cambridge Analytica, a special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th district, Trump agreeing to meet with North Korea, and Roseanne. Whether or not you believe these were objectively positive or negative events, it’s not immediately clear that any one of them had the necessary staying power to really move the needle.
Others have offered some plausible explanations.
Maybe some are no longer punishing him for some of his unpopular legislative pushes—like his support for unpopular proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Maybe some Republicans have come back into the fold now that major intra-party fights are no longer dominating political headlines. Or Trump could be getting out of his own way more than usual and letting voters focus on the economy.
The point is that there’s more than one plausible explanation, and there’s a lot of overlap between them. Moreover, if we’re going to understand some of the bigger swings in Trumps’ approval (e.g. the increase from around 37 percent in the middle of December 2017 to about 42 percent now) it’s worth thinking through these theories broadly and figuring out what does (and doesn’t) fit.
