President Donald Trump, the most unpopular president in at least 40 years, continues to slides in approval polls — and is even losing the faith of his own supporters.
Poll: Donald Trump has hit a new low
He’s even sliding with his base.
Photo by Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images
According to a new poll from Politico and Morning Consult, the president’s approval rating now sits at 42 percent — a new low for the Trump administration. Even more worrying for the Trump administration: Morale is declining among Trump’s own base.
To be sure, 84 percent of Trump voters say they still approve of the job Trump is doing, but the percentage of his base that “strongly approves” of him is down to 42 percent, from the 49 percent polled previously.
And the forecast for Trump doesn’t look great, either: This poll was conducted after Trump abruptly fired former FBI Director James Comey last week, but before the two major news reports that 1) the president reportedly disclosed highly classified information to a Russian official, and 2) Comey released a memo claiming Trump tried to stop an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
The Trump administration has been mired in scandal week after week, but the current chaos seems to be having an effect on American voters across party lines — a clear shift from early polling on the reports that showed more partisan reactions.
Congressional Republicans themselves have begun decrying the “drama” in the White House as distraction from pushing the GOP’s policy agenda on Capitol Hill, and Republican leaders haven’t been as quick to rush to Trump’s defense. Lawmakers in both parties have increasingly started demanding answers.
If Trump remains this unpopular, it could hurt Republican politicians going forward. In the wake of this turmoil in the White House, Democrats have been watching vulnerable Republican House and Senate seats very closely. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop writes, low approval ratings don’t bode well for the Republican majority in the 2018 midterm election.
“Every postwar president with a sub-50 percent approval rating around midterm time has lost a double-digit number of House seats, with truly massive landslides being common,” Prokop writes.
In other words, if Trump’s approval rating continues to drop, he could be risking the Republican majority in Congress.
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