The other day I was involved in a debate where the topic of Trump's popularity cropped up, I think it’s an interesting topic so done some research
into it and figured it could make for an interesting ATS thread. Now I just want to be clear, my intention with this thread is not to say that anyone
is right or wrong for supporting Trump rather it’s just to generate discussion around his (un)popularity.
Now objectively I believe Trump to be an unpopular president, just like I am sure many of you might regard him as being popular, indeed on ATS I think
it’s fair to say that President Trump is popular among the membership. Although this is not a subjective or even accurate measure of his popularity.
The measure used mostly to look at the popularity, or approval ratings of world leaders is to look at how they are polling among the electorate.
Perhaps the best source for polling information comes from
FiveThirtyEight who
aggregate polls looking at Trumps popularity from a verity of sources to create an overview of a range of polling information. At time of writing
this thread Trump has an approval rating of only 41% with a 53% disapproval rating. Now to be clear, these numbers are bad, and they are consistently
bad, in fact, Trumps overall approval ratings for his first year and a half in office have been the worst of any President in recent history. When you
look at the aggregate of polls he has never broke the 50% approval rating. The most recent
YouGov poll shows that overall 41%
of the participants "Strongly disapprove" of him with only 29% reporting to "Strongly approve" of him something that is consistent other polls
I know that many of you reading this might argue that the polls are bias in some way, that they target individuals who disapprove of Trump. However,
this argument is flawed because even if you look polls coming from conservative sources such as
Fox News who have been supportive of Trump his polling numbers are still abysmal with is
approval number being below 50%. There are also polls from
Rasmussen Report, which
some have argued to be a right-leaning
polling group who have also struggled to provide data that shows strong support for Trump. Their polling consistently demonstrates that amounts most
participants more strongly disapprove of trump than strongly approve. It is worth noting however that they have at times demonstrated that Trump has
broken the 50% mark however they seem to be the only pollsters who have demonstrated this, and their data is at odds with all other pollsters and
it’s not regarded as high grade poll with a C+ rating.
Trumps unpopularity is not isolated just to America, international polls looking at his popularity have also consistently demonstrated that he is
unpopular. He is globally regarded as being less popular than the Russian and Chinese leaders
(link). Under Trump global approval of
US leadership is the lowest it has ever been
(Link) with
the Guardian reporting that.
Global confidence in US leadership has fallen to a new low, and the country now ranks below China in worldwide approval ratings, according to
a new Gallup poll.
The survey of opinion in 134 countries showed a record collapse in approval for the US role in the world, from 48% under Obama to 30% after one year
of Donald Trump – the lowest level Gallup has recorded since beginning its global leadership poll over a decade ago.
Some of you who have taken the time to read through this entire thread will no doubt want to question the validity of polling by making the point that
the pollsters were wrong about the 2016 election results. There seems to be something of mandala effect going on where people have collectively
forgotten that while yes, the pollsters initially favoured Hilary to win by the last final few days of the election it became much closer.
RealClearPolitics keeps an archive of the polling results in the run up
during the last few days of the 2016 election and if you take the time to look at the numbers you can clearly see that most pollsters were actually
only a few points off a final figure for the popular vote with 46% to Trump and 48% to Clinton, its not surprising perhaps with these polling numbers
to also not he also failed to win the popular vote during the election, the lowest margin of any POTUS, ever.
(Link).
With that in mind, looking at the polling data one has to conclude that it would be wrong to argue that Trump is regarding as a popular president
because during his first year he was actually the
least popular president in recent American history and this trend seems to be continuing. The point of this this I just emphasis is
not to chastise anyone who supports Trump, it is merely to highlight that they are in the minority with their support of Trump. Trump is not a popular
President.