Just moments after Trump tweeted that his Rasmussen poll numbers show him with a higher presidential approval rating at this point than President Obama had, a real poll was released showing just how badly the country believes Trump is at his job.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll was released the same morning, conducted in the time period from April 8 to April 11, 2018, and the responses are not favorable to President Trump. His approval has fallen to just 38 percent, which matches his lowest approval rating from October 2017. His disapproval rating stands at 57 percent, just one point less than the 58 percent he received in October 2017.
These low numbers aren’t just a harbinger of doom for Trump in 2020, they bode alarmingly poorly for Republicans in Congress who are up for reelection in November. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise considering that GOP congressman, even the GOP Speaker of the House, are bailing in anticipation of the blue wave they face in a matter of months. The preference among poll respondents for a Democratic-controlled Congress is a full seven points higher than the preference for a Republican-controlled Congress.
In addition, 12 percent more people want their 2018 vote to “send a message that we need more Democrats to be a check and balance to Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans” than the opposite. So far, special elections such as the one in Alabama where Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore in the reddest of red states and another in Pennsylvania where Democrat Conor Lamb upset Rick Saccone in a district that Trump won by nearly 21 points in 2016, have been pointed to as predicting a sweep for Democrats in 2018.
Both Moore and Saccone were endorsed by President Trump.
Even more disastrous for the president are the increasing number of people who believe that the indictments and guilty pleas in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russian government operatives are indicative of wrongdoing by Trump as much as they are indicative of wrongdoing by the four Trump campaign members who’ve faced legal troubles thus far.
There is also a wide disconnect between poll respondents who lean Republican who originally said they consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than a supporter of the GOP itself. In September of 2017, just seven months ago, 20 percent more right-leaning voters said they were more a supporter of Trump himself than the GOP as a whole. That number is now even.
While Trump may prefer pointing to Rasmussen polls almost exclusively, which tend to be more favorable to him, the totality of polls across his presidency have never been great. To be fair, Rasmussen isn’t an illegitimate polling site, there are just major issues with the wording of their poll questions and the subject matter they prefer.
The truth is that polls that bear any sort of credible weight show that Trump is slipping in approval ratings and increasing in disapproval with voters, and none of that bodes well for the GOP in 2018 or 2020.
Featured image via Getty/Pool
