Trump's Bounce
It's real. It ain't impressive.
[I’m not going to even try. I scheduled this one Monday night and then watched a movie, only to find that the Special Counsel’s report documenting Trump’s crimes had been released. I doubt it affects anything below much, although surely it doesn’t help Trump’s popularity (and yes, someone inevitably will say that it will do so, but it really doesn’t work that way. Especially right now when he’s doing well with the small group of those who don’t like him much but are open to approving of him). Anyway, didn’t want to leave y’all without mentioning that we have yet more evidence that the incoming President of the United States of America is a lawless crook, but I’m keeping everything below as it was before the news.]
As Donald Trump’s inauguration approaches, it’s now clear that he did in fact get something of an election bounce in public opinion. Just not a very big one.
First of all, he’s about as well-liked as he ever has been: Not much. He’s at an estimated 47.2%/47.4% favorable/unfavorable (via FiveThirtyEight). G. Elliott Morris has more, but the basic story is that he’s had a bit of a rally and despite that he’s still not very popular at all.
Gallup also tested approval for the transition in early December, with similar results. Trump’s 51/%/44% approve/disapprove for the transition isn’t terrible, and it’s somewhat better than his numbers going into his first term. But the lowest approval for any recent non-Trump presidential transition was 10 percentage points higher.
In other words, Trump is basically doing about the best he’s ever done with public opinion, but that’s still quite a bit worse than any other president-elect. Or, for that matter, any president just after winning re-election.
It’s really no surprise that most presidents reach their high point in approval over the first two years at or just after they are sworn into office.1 The ceremonial aspects of winning, transition, and actually becoming president tend to produce unity among the new president’s party, and muted opposition at best from the out-party. Coverage from the “neutral” media is often overwhelmingly positive. People hear lots of different things from candidates during the campaign; it’s still possible, before hard choices are made, for everyone to believe that the president-elect will fulfill all those different expectations.
A well-run inauguration followed by a few popular actions could produce a much higher initial job approval than Trump had last time, when he managed to pick a fight with reality over crowd sizes and then botched a travel ban that likely would have been unpopular even had it been well handled. On the other hand, while inaugural addresses are pretty easy, Trump has a long history of screwing up easy events.2
After that? Again, I wouldn’t discount the possibility that he gets a real honeymoon this time. After all, the economy is strong, the big spike in inflation is gone, crime is down, border crossings are down, and the US doesn’t have troops deployed in active combat. Yes, all that was true for Joe Biden over the last year without being enough to save him or Kamala Harris, but the more inflation and the pandemic recede from people’s memories, the more it’s apt to benefit the incumbent. Trump loves taking credit for things whether he had anything to do with them or not, but just because he’s unusually crass about it doesn’t make it unusual to do so. He wouldn’t be the first president to be helped inheriting good times.
That said, the chance that he chooses some unpopular policies to emphasize early on, and that implementation goes poorly in a way that hurts his popularity, seems reasonably high.
After all, presidents with a better sense of public opinion, larger victory margins, and a more manageable coalition have run into trouble because they mistakenly concluded that a November victory was conclusive proof that everything they wanted to do was overwhelmingly popular. A lot of Trump’s authoritarian impulses proved very unpopular the first time around, and he’s at least threatening to do more of that this time. We can’t predict how any of this will play out, but Trump may well find out that attempting to suppress dissent may have occasional successes (an editorial squashed here, a network pulling its punches there) but at a significant overall cost.
And it’s not just what the president wants, whether it’s Trump or Joe Biden or anyone else. Party actors on the winning side always have policy demands. Winning has the same effect on parties as on presidents, tending to dull their instincts for avoiding public opinion dangers. Regardless, party actors are apt to insist on their policy demands even if they recognize that they may not be well-liked by the general public. Even if a president wants to, defeating the party may prove quite difficult.
Most of this is just a general guide to presidents and public opinion. I’d add first that whatever patterns we’ve seen in the past may not hold for Trump for a lot of reasons, including that it’s neither a new nor a normal second-term presidency. And second? Neither Trump nor his party have shown much in the way of job skills. Perhaps they’ll surprise us. I’m not expecting that.
None of which is to make any predictions about Trump’s approval level in two weeks, or June, or a year from November. Just that there are plenty of reasons to expect him to be peaking soon, and even more reasons to expect it to be difficult for him to stay as popular (or perhaps better to call it not-unpopular) as he is now.
For some, including Barack Obama, Biden, and Trump in his first term, the early peak was the highest approval of their presidencies.
That’s not just a subjective judgement, although it is that. It’s confirmed by the polls. To be sure: Trump also has a solid group of strong supporters who like everything he does, and that (plus events) helped his approval rating avoid the kind of very low numbers that several other presidents had to deal with. But at least so far, he’s never had the high points that every other polling-era president has had.
Fifty-odd years ago, as an undergraduate at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service (please pardon the name dropping) I got a rudimentary education in public opinion—what it is, how its measured, what it means, etc. I decided not to pursue a career in political science—opting instead for a career in policy-making and implementation/administration.
What has struck me — and increasingly frustrated and then irritated me — is how pollsters are just asking over and over again questions that don't really mean anything. A question about whether you approve strongly, approve, neither approve nor disapprove, disapprove, disapprove strongly of a candidate, president-elect, president, or policy, by itself, says nothing important. What is important is not the 'grade' a person assigns but their reasons for assigning it—and what matters even more is whether their reasons are grounded in anything substantive. And as you note, the usefulness of the comparison to the past is increasingly limited because the present doesn't look much like the past.
Sure these "reports" on what "the public" feels/thinks (in that order) make for flashy 20-second segments on TV news and 'print' media—not to mention fodder for 'political pundits' and the consultant class on their TV/marketing appearances. I'm inclined to argue that bad polling bears considerable responsibility for the current dysfunctional state of politics in the U.S. and probably elsewhere.
I'd be interested in what your assessment is of the current state of opinion polling/research and what suggestions you have for making public opinion polling/research more useful as a tool or resource for achieving — to use the term borrowed by Rorty from Baldwin — a working democracy.