A year of Trump, again
It’s going about as badly for him as the first time around
According to Gallup, Donald Trump’s approval rating sits at 36% — roughly the same as it was at the one-year mark of his first term. If you look at his New York Times polling average, his approval there is at around 42%. Trump’s approval rests somewhere between “bad” and “extremely bad” for the end of the first year of his second term (Barack Obama was sitting at 48% in January of 2010).
Now that he’s president once again, the American people are back to disapproving of Trump’s style of governing. From tasking ICE with thuggish occupations of American cities to squeezing families with tariffs and high prices, Trump seems committed to doing everything except addressing Americans’ top concerns.
The challenge for liberals is hidden in the crosstabs of the many polls which find Trump with significant disapproval. Republicans are far more likely to express approval of Trump.
Recent declines are mostly due to slippage with Independents, who have drifted from 46% approval at the start of Trump 2.0 to just 25% today (per Gallup). Their shifts are a good sign that voters are taking seriously the many dramatic failings of the Trump Administration. However, this doesn’t mean voters are shifting their basic ideological leanings.
The number of voters identifying as liberal has ticked up over time, but liberals still lag behind those who identify as moderate or conservative. Among Independents, “moderate” is by far the most popular option, at 47%. The rise of “Independent” identity represents an increasing disaffection with both parties, as voters refuse to identify as Democrats or Republicans (often despite pretty consistent voting histories). Large numbers of voters believe that most politicians are corrupt, especially those that have been in power the longest, and don’t see either party as sharing their concerns.
Those voters who are true Independents are a crucial part of a successful coalition, and they’re not totally sold on the Democratic alternative to Trump just yet. Approval ratings of the Democratic Party are among the worst ever recorded: somewhere around 34% (according to YouGov) or 37% (according to Gallup), compared to 41% at this time in 2017. Approval of the party among self-identified Democrats is also at a record low.
To build a durable governing majority, Democrats need to go beyond being the “less-bad” option and create a coalition that actively welcomes voters who are turned off by Trump and share our core values. We need to take proactive steps to fight corruption, level the playing field for workers, and create programs that actually lower costs.
A failure to do so will condemn us to a politics that ricochets back and forth between unpopular presidents and limits governance to small, easily reversed changes. It would be a shame to survive this presidency only to find ourselves back here again in a few years.
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