Trump’s new favorite poll actually contains almost nothing but bad news for him

Over the past week, President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted an NPR/PBS/Marist poll because it shows his approval rating among Latinos has gone up since last month. But if the president dug deeper, he’d see that the poll actually contains almost nothing but very bad news for him.

In fact, the poll is so bleak for Trump that his decision to highlight what it says about his Latino approval numbers is a bit like a person bragging about their kitchen countertops while a hurricane destroys their home.

On Tuesday morning, Trump posted a tweet highlighting what the poll says about his approval among Latinos.

(The poll actually indicates Trump’s approval among Latinos has increased by 19 percent since last month, not last year, as he says.)

On Sunday, Trump retweeted a tweet from Charlie Kirk that highlights the same metric.

Trump first tweeted about the poll on Sunday morning, when he linked his surging approval among Latinos with his push to secure funding for a wall along the southern border.

While polling Latino populations is notoriously difficult, it’s true that the NPR/PBS/Marist poll shows Trump’s approval among Latinos has increased. But the overall picture emerging from the poll is an ugly one for Trump.

NPR’s summary of the poll notes that amid the ongoing government shutdown, “Trump’s approval rating is down, and there are cracks showing with his base.” It notes that 45 percent of respondents strongly disapprove of Trump’s job performance — the highest percentage since December 2017.

Not only does the poll show that Trump’s approval fell to 39 percent from 42 percent in December, but in particular, his approval eroded among demographics that are considered to be his core supporters — suburban men, white evangelicals, Republicans, and men without college degrees.

Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, told NPR that “for the first time, we saw a fairly consistent pattern of having his base showing evidence of a cracking. ... Don’t know if that’s temporary — tied to the government shutdown — or a broader problem the president is having.”

Perhaps most concerning for Trump is the fact that a majority of registered voters who responded to the poll — 57 percent — say they will definitely vote against him in 2020.

NPR provides more context for that number:

Just 76 percent of Trump supporters, 69 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of white evangelicals say they will definitely vote for him. Many, if not most, of them will likely vote for the president, but their softness in supporting him for re-election is a sign of vulnerability.

For context, in 2010, when asked about then-President Barack Obama, just 36 percent said they would definitely vote for him, while 48 percent said they would not. Obama went on to win with 51 percent of the vote.

But for Trump to have more than half the country already saying it definitely won’t vote for him indicates he is facing a difficult re-election.

Miringoff told NPR that Trump’s “reelection prospects would definitely be in jeopardy at this point” because he “has had his base and not much else.”

Suffice it to say that overall, the poll contains much more bad news than good news for Trump.

Trump has established a pattern of embracing polls that reflect positively on him and dismissing those that don’t.

He has also argued that polls don’t accurately reflect his popularity because “at least 10 percent of people ... don’t want to say they’re voting for him,” as he put it at a rally last April.

One thing that has become clear across different polls is that Trump’s position on the government shutdown is not popular. In a rundown of the recent polling published last week, Fox News highlighted a Quinnipiac poll that found 63 percent of people “agree with the Democratic proposal to reopen parts of the government that do not involve border security,” compared to just 30 percent opposed.

That poll found that 56 percent of Americans blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown — numbers that dovetail with NPR’s findings about the percentage of voters who have already made up their minds that they won’t vote for Trump in 2020.

Trump, however, believes what he wants to believe. The day after Fox News published its aforementioned rundown of polls that universally are bad for him, he tweeted an allusion to new polls showing “numbers are going up fast, over 50%.”

It remains completely unclear what poll Trump was referring to. Even reliably Trump-friendly polls like Rasmussen currently show that his approval rating is clearly in negative territory.