The following column by Robert Schlesinger was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website August 18, 2017:
Charlottesville doesn’t figure to arrest Trump’s declining poll numbers with his base.
How low can President Donald Trump go? I don’t mean in the moral context but rather the colder calculus of public approval and political power. After this week’s enraging equivocation about white supremacists rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia we may find out.
Trump already seems intent on testing the lower boundaries of his support. As of Thursday afternoon, his job approval rating was a hair under 39 percent, according to HuffPost’s average of surveys and had been beneath 40 percent for three weeks. He’s never approached 50 percent approval and he’s had majority disapproval for five months and counting. Nothing he’s done in his seven months in office, or this week especially, could lead one to believe that he is trying to augment that figure. Instead he seems more interested in rallying his hardest-core supporters, everyone else be damned.
His Charlottesville self-immolation will no doubt delight a hard-core base entranced by the flames but figures to push his support even deeper among everyone else (a group also known as the majority of the country); his ongoing feud with other elected Republicans also figures to erode his public and political standings.
And of course these dynamics are interrelated. Every time Trump makes a “both sides” pronouncement or takes up the cause of Confederate romanticism, the other members of this party are forced to react or to visibly and pathetically dodge. So Trump’s inflammatory “both sides” rhetoric spurred a fresh round of public brow-furrowing among elected Republicans, many of whom chose to distance themselves from him (again) in various ways. “Mr. President, you can’t allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of the blame,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted, for example. And Michigan GOP Rep. Justin Amash tweeted that “‘Very fine people’ do not participate in rallies with groups chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans and displaying vile symbols of hate,” contra Trump’s bizarre assertion otherwise.
And while, like many Trump critics, I’ve had my share of fun tweaking Republican pols for voicing their concerns about Trump while voting in near lock-step with him, I’ve come to the view that even rhetorical condemnations do matter. First of all, as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein has argued, “it would make no sense at all for [congressional Republicans] to abandon their own priorities just because the president behaves badly.” And in terms of actual actions, their support has not been unflagging: The Russia sanctions bill Trump had to sign (or see his veto overturned by a GOP-controlled House and Senate) was a surprisingly forceful rebuke for a recently-elected president from what should be a friendly congress.
But beyond that, increasingly visible discomfort from Republican politicians is important because it helps set up a permission-structure, signaling to rank-and-file Republicans that criticizing the president is OK. After all some portion of Trump-approvers are undoubtedly true believers but some nontrivial number may be privately uncomfortable with him while expressing outward support based on partisan instinct and tribal loyalty. As they see high-profile party members break with the president more and more will feel empowered to do likewise. This also holds true for this week’s mass migration of business leaders from the Trump advisory orbit.
And it cuts both ways: As the president Trump-angulates himself away from the GOP he forces a choice for rank-and-file GOPers between himself and the party. And while he enjoys high partisan popularity, it’s too soon to say what portion of that is classic party loyalty and what part is cult of Trump-manship.
But there’s a growing mountain of data to suggest that his standing within the party has measurably deteriorated. In Gallup’s polling for example Trump entered office enjoying 89 percent approval among Republicans, according to Frank Newport, the survey company’s editor-in-chief. As recently as mid-July he was at 87 percent in the party; as of last weekend he had dipped to 79 percent.
And that trend is replicated across other polls. In his first days in office, Trump enjoyed 92 percent GOP support, including 64 percent who described themselves as strongly approving, according to SurveyMonkey; but that group’s most recent poll has those figures down to 85 percent support, 51 percent strong while his party disapproval has gone from 6 percent to 15 percent. Ipsos/Reuters had Trump with 85 percent GOP approval in January and 11 percent disapproval and those figures are now 75 percent and 22 percent. CNN had the party approval figure at 90 percent in early February, with 73 percent strongly approving but figures are down to 83 percent and 59 percent strong approval this month, while the disapproval number has jumped from 8 percent to 14 percent. Even in polls where he’s held relatively steady, approval-wise, like Politico/Morning Consult, his party negatives have jumped, in this case from 8 percent in January to 16 percent this week. The litany goes on.
Other measures show his base eroding: While he enjoyed either parity or net-positive approval among those without a college education in January, for example, his standing has decreased markedly among that group. He had 52 percent approval in that group in January and 45 percent disapproval, according to SurveyMonkey but now those figures have flipped: 43 percent approve and 53 percent disapprove. Marist tells a similar story: 47 percent approval and 43 percent disapproval among those without a college education in February has become 38 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval (almost as many in this group disapprove strongly, 37 percent, as approve of him at all). He’s gone from margin of error (48-50) in CNN’s early polling to 41-53 in its most recent survey and he’s gone from a wide advantage (48-33) among this demographic in Politico/Morning Consult’s January polling to 47-48 this week.
Or take those making less than $50,000 annually. Politico/Morning Consult gave him a 45-37 advantage in this group in January, but now finds they oppose him by 44-51. He went from 40-34 in favor in the YouGov/Economist poll in January to 33-54 against this week, with more people strongly disapproving (40 percent) than approving at all.
Granted that Trump remains popular within the party but the trend, reflected in a series of polls, must be a concern for the White House, especially this early in Trump’s term.
So what is the core of support for a politician who increasingly shows himself to be without an actual moral core? Republican pollster Kristen Soltis-Anderson this week estimated Trump’s floor to be around 24 percent. “After looking at a variety of polls, it seems about one in four voters is with him no matter what,” she wrote Tuesday. “I’ve noticed this number not just in recent job approval tracking but on a host of questions about the president’s temperament and tweeting, the two items most likely to get a thumbs-down from reluctant Republicans who have stuck with him.” HuffPost Pollster’s Ariel Edwards-Levy came at it from a slightly different angle and put the figure at 14 percent: “That’s the share of Americans who say both that they approve of Trump’s performance as president, and that there’s almost nothing Trump could do to lose their approval,” she wrote Tuesday.
Bloomberg’s Bernstein on Wednesday looked at the history of presidential approval ratingsand reached a similar conclusion to Soltis-Anderson, that 1 in 4 “seems to be the point at which we reach hard-core partisans. … So I think Trump is unlikely to get below around 25 percent unless he really becomes a president without a party.”
Of course given the centrifugal force at work between Trump and his party even that scenario, while unlikely, is not impossible. Trump says or does something outrageous, causing Republicans to distance himself from them, furthering angering him and thus making him more likely to lash out and less likely to be constrained from doing or saying something outrageous. Rinse and repeat as the rank-and-file on the right are increasingly forced to pick sides.
It’s hard to say whether that’s a vicious cycle for the GOP or, in the end, a virtuous one.
View the post here.