By Dustin Rowles | Politics | August 31, 2018 |
By Dustin Rowles | Politics | August 31, 2018 |
Earlier this week, Donald Trump tweeted this:
Over 90% approval rating for your all time favorite (I hope) President within the Republican Party and 52% overall. This despite all of the made up stories by the Fake News Media trying endlessly to make me look as bad and evil as possible. Look at the real villains please!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2018
The only problem here is that it is completely untrue. There is not any legitimate poll in the nation that has Donald Trump anywhere near 52 percent. Hell, the last Fox News poll only shows him with a 45 percent approval rating, and that’s much better than most polls suggest.
Today, ABC News and The Washington Post released a new poll, and with a little more than two months until the midterms, it seems that Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, the Mueller Probe, and Stormy Daniels are actually starting to make a difference. The poll shows a whopping 60 percent of Americans disapprove of how the President is handling his presidency.
Looking deep, and the numbers are even worse: 49 percent of Americans believe that Congress should begin impeachment proceedings; 53 percent believe that he has committed obstruction of justice; 63 percent support the Mueller probe; and 64 percent do not believe that Jeff Sessions should be fired.
The poll also shows that support among Republicans is weakening, with only 78 percent of Republicans supporting the President.
There is also some suggestion in the poll that Paul Manafort’s conviction may have played a role, as 67 percent of Americans believe that Mueller’s actions against Manafort were justified, while only 18 percent support the idea of Trump pardoning Manafort. That 18 percent, presumably, is the base base — the 18 percent of the country that will follow Trump into a volcano.
It’s also worth noting that President Obama’s disapproval ratings bottomed out in the months before his first midterm election, although they hit a low of only 48 percent disapproval. Republicans picked up 63 seats in those midterms. Bill Clinton had a 49 percent disapproval rating going into his first midterms, and Republicans picked up 54 seats.
Meanwhile, the most conservative estimates show the Democrats picking up at least 33 seats in November, enough to flip the House. With Trump’s 60 percent disapproval rating, we could be seeing far more pickups than 33, and if so, Trump is screwed, although he will undoubtedly use the lame-duck session to try and fire Jeff Sessions and Robert Mueller.