We were asked to fact check if Donald Trump’s approval rating is at a historic low days before the inauguration. The source of the fact check comes from a Politcususa article in which they claim “America is not giving Donald Trump a warm welcome to the White House as a new poll found that Trump’s job approval rating has dropped seven points to 37% over the past month.”
The source for this comes from a Quinnipiac Poll conducted between 1/5 – 1/9. The poll shows that 37% of American’s approve of Donald Trump and 51% do not. According to Pew Research, the lowest pre-inaugural approval rating for a President was George W. Bush in 2001, with a rating of 50%. If comparing Quinnipiac’s poll number of 37% to George W. Bush’s 50%, then certainly it would be true that Trump has the lowest Pre-inaugural approval rating in recent history.
Image Source: Pew Research
There are other polls, however, that show Trump with higher approval ratings. A Reuters/Ipsos poll that ended on 1/3 showed Trump with a favorable rating of 50%, which is tied with George W. Bush. In another poll conducted by Rasmussen that ended on 12/22, Trump had a 51% favorable rating.
In order to really determine if Trump has the lowest pre-inaugural approval rating in recent history, we must look at the averages of all recent polls. To do that we will use the current Real Clear Politics polling average for Trump’s approval. According to Real Clear Politics, Trump’s current approval rating is 42.8%, which is still well below George W. Bush’s 50% rating in 2001.
We rate the claim that Trump has the lowest recent historical approval rating before an inauguration as MOSTLY TRUE. Using the averages of all recent polls it is certainly true, however there have been polls in the last 2 weeks that show Trump tied or slightly ahead of George W. Bush.
All sources are hyperlinking in the article.
Left vs. Right Bias: How we rate the bias of media sources
Why doesn’t your evaluation address the problem with oversampling of democrats in most of these polls that show Trump below 50%? If you believe polls, then Hillary should be President.
It is interesting to note that just from these numbers(and of course they are not be giving the full picture), the republicans stay on similar numbers through these administrations(72-78% approval of republican presidents, 42-48% approval of democratic presidents), while the numbers support my impression that the democrats have become much more divisive and biased/partisan, going from 61% support of a republican president George H. W. Bush, to half of that, 29% for George W. Bush, to again half, 15% for Donald Trump. While democrat support for Bill Clinton was at 77% and Obama at 92%(getting close to Saddam’s election results in Iraq).
Most of the mainstream medias like to blame Trump and the GOP for political divisiveness in the U.S., but my impression is that it is the opposite, the democrats and their helpers in the media that are responsible for demonizing Donald Trump and his administration, and creating an almost civil war like atmosphere with their “resist” and “obstruct” mentality. And these numbers seem to support that.
Another thing to take into account regarding approval polls of the Trump presidency, is that almost all the polls before his election win, showed him losing the election. That revealed a bias over the whole line of American pollsters(something Trump and his team had claimed many times during the campaign). Therefor I think polls that got the election results more correct, like Rasmussen, should be given much greater weight in anything that has to do with Trump or his administration.