Trump's popularity compared to other second-termers
Finding the President's proper peer group
We know that Donald Trump isn’t particularly popular. His approval ratings keep hovering around 40%, which isn’t great, although that’s far from the lowest among modern presidents, and in fact it’s pretty similar to his approval rating in his first term. But what exactly should we be comparing him to?
I’ve seen a number of political observers claim that Trump is the least popular of any of the modern presidents at this point in his term. But this strikes me as problematic. Note this page at Strength In Numbers, where Trump’s current net approval is compared against every other president’s since Eisenhower. But importantly, he’s being measured against other presidents in their first terms, and Trump is in his second.
This strikes me as inapt. Most second term presidents are less popular than they were in their first terms.
G. Elliott Morris was kind enough to share his data with me, and I used those to compare Trump’s current (second-term) net approval ratings against those of other second-term presidents. Here’s a figure showing them all.
Trump is, to be sure, low on this scale, but not the lowest. Nixon had come into his second term fairly popular, but that quickly turned around as the Watergate investigation revealed more of his complicity and mendacity. Thus at the beginning of 1974 (one year into Nixon’s second term), he had a nearly 30-point net unpopularity, substantially below where Trump is now. Trump’s trajectory is most closely tracking that of George W. Bush, who came off a fairly strong reelection and ran into the realities of a slowing economy and an increasingly unpopular and prolonged war in Iraq at this point in 2006. Trump is currently not even that far below where Barack Obama was in early 2014, although Obama’s net approval would recover into positive territory during his last year in office.
This chart also shows the impact of the Iran-Contra scandal on Reagan’s second term, with his high net approvals plummeting to near zero in 1987, although still staying far above where Bush and Nixon ended up.
I continue to believe that modern presidents have much more bracketed approval ratings thanks to voter polarization, and I doubt we’ll see Trump drop a whole lot more than this — certainly not into Nixon territory. But regardless, when we try to understand some political fact, we should always ask, “Compared to what?” Trump is unpopular. But he’s not the least popular president ever. And the fact that he’s not, even while doing more than any other modern president to fundamentally end representative democracy and domestic tranquility, tells us far more about the electorate than about him.
Having spent (squandered?) a lot of time recently looking at the same approval/disapproval data, I acknowledge that Trump is not at Nixon's low. Trump might, however, asymptotically approach it, even accounting for the political-tribal polarization.
Per Gallup, Nixon was at or near 24% when he left office. (Source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/12676/questions-answers-editor-chief.aspx#:~:text=Yes.,years%20since%20he%20left%20office) Here's G. Elliot Morris - who is relentlessly informative and on whom we both apparently rely for such information - speculating in December that Trump's approval could fall into the mid-low 30s. (Source: https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/how-the-floor-could-fall-out-for)
Tribal partisanship probably will keep Trump above the Nixon 20s, but ICE, as Morris says (see his January data-analysis columns), could be come a 70-30 disapproval issue for him. ICE, plus the economy/inflation/jobs, and Trump's other disliked initiatives (e.g., Greenland) could move him toward that lower bound of ~30%.
I think - perhaps too hopefully - that the continuous and manifest chaos, incompetence, corruption, cruelty, and vindictive approach to his opponents will get him closer to that 30%. The increasing unease Congressional Rs are displaying (e.g., distancing themselves from Trump on healthcare, Epstein, Greenland and Jerome Powell, and declining to seek re-election in 2026) indicates to me that's what the Rs in Congress think is happening.
Yup, the point made about the zombie American electorate that allegedly still gives approval ratings to the orange fascist, is creepy as all get out. I wonder what's in their water?