March 6: Trump Job Approval Again Underwater, Where It Belongs
As an inveterate poll-watcher, I have been waiting for the moment when Donald Trump’s job approval numbers went underwater, his accustomed position for nearly all of his presidential career. It arrived around the time he made his speech to Congress, as I noted at New York:
Even as he was delivering the most partisan address to Congress maybe ever, Donald Trump’s public support seemed to be regularly eroding. An updated FiveThirtyEight average of Trump’s approval ratings on March 4 (released just as news broke that ABC was shutting down the revered data site) showed him going underwater for the first time since reoccupying the White House, with 47.6 percent approval and 47.9 percent disapproval. That puts Trump back in the same territory of public opinion he occupied during his first term as president, where (per Gallup) he never achieved more than 50 percent job approval, and averaged a mere 41 percent.
Perhaps Trump will get lucky and conditions in the country will improve enough to validate his agenda, but it’s more likely that the same sour public climate that overwhelmed Joe Biden will now afflict his predecessor and successor.
The Reuters/Ipsos survey that pushed Trump’s numbers into negative territory showed a mood very different from the 47th president’s boasts about a new “golden age” for our country:
“Thirty-four percent of Americans say that the country is headed in the right direction, compared to 49% who say it is off on the wrong track. When it comes to several specific issues, Americans are more likely to say things are off on the wrong track than going in the right direction: cost of living (22% right direction / 60% wrong track), the national economy (31% right direction / 51% wrong track), national politics (33% right direction / 50% wrong track), American foreign policy (33% right direction / 49% wrong track), and employment and jobs (33% right direction / 47% wrong track).”
So all the hype about Trump being a popular president who was in the midst of engineering a major realignment of the American electorate is already looking more than a bit hollow. Trump has a solid Republican base of support and a solid Democratic opposition, with independents currently leaning towards the Democratic Party on most issues. Perhaps Trump’s agenda will gain momentum and support, but since he’s not trying to reach out beyond his party’s base at all, he’s going to need a lift from Americans who only voted for him in 2024 as the lesser of evils and may not vote in the 2026 midterms at all.
At present Trump has lost whatever presidential “honeymoon” he initially enjoyed after his return to the White House, and needs to find new converts to return to genuine popularity. He’s not off to a great start.
Although this may be a little late, anyone interested in this issue should go to http://www.sonoran.org. They have quantified the benefits of public land and roadless areas, and found that they increase the local incomes by 60-75% compared to opening regions to natural resource extraction. This is due to the fact that people want to live in these areas, bringing with them high paying jobs and money.
Local environmental measures are nice, but don’t forget that ecology issues — slighted by the presidency and in the presidential debates and campaigns and states of the union, now since the Montreal Protocol almost 20 years ago — must be RADICALLY reversed at the FEDERAL level or all the local measures will just have been shifting around deck chairs on the Titanic. At least we are moving beyond the silly emphasis of most Earth Days on INDIVIDUAL action (although that is important) to local and state government (more important). But only NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL DRASTIC changes, especially on energy, including the global warming issue, but extending to many other unfolding catastrophes will meet the need. The election of 2004 was a terrible defeat because Bush managed to steal Ohio by getting away with a systematic policy of denying adequate voting machines to Democratic precincts. This was part of a larger pattern of the Democrats AND media rolling over on key spins like the flipflop issue and the Matt Bai distortion to engineer a “mandate” once again for the Republicans. Such is the ‘tramoya’ (jury-rigging of appearances, rough translation) that US “democracy” has become. Justifying the lying in the media is not new, but it got worse with the onset of the Cold War in the 40s and is worse than ever now, though the pretense of freedom is GREATER than ever.