We're now a third of the way into President Donald Trump's four-year term. It's time to check in on his approval ratings again.
The good news for Trump: He's sustained his 2018 public opinion rally. Via FiveThirtyEight, through Wednesday he was about 6 percentage points better than his mid-December low point. That leaves him right around 42 percent approval. He's plateaued for now, staying around the same spot for the last two weeks. He's also continued to move up, albeit not quite in a straight line, so that this 42 percent approval level is higher than he was in April.
I do think that moving from the mid- to high 30s into the low 40s probably has some important political consequences. If he can stick around at this level, the chances of a serious primary challenge will start dropping. I've been thinking that 40 percent approval is probably the approximate dividing line, with anything under that marker pushing ambitious Republicans to begin thinking it might be riskier to sit on the sidelines in 2020 than to challenge someone who might well be seen by then as a certain loser.
It's also true that every small improvement in presidential popularity should mean fewer losses for Republicans in November.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that his approval rating through 489 days is once again dead last among all presidents during the polling era at this point. He had moved past both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter for a while, but both of them had (short-lived) small rallies at this point. Right now, Trump is in last, followed by Carter and Harry Truman at 43.1 percent, Ford at 44.2 and Ronald Reagan at 45.0. If Trump continues to rally, he has a decent chance to move up several slots, and as long as the bottom doesn't drop out, he'll exit last place soon. But make no mistake: Trump continues to be a highly unpopular president, and he's by far the least popular over the course of the first 16 months by a large margin.
As far as why he's moved up some, Mark Blumenthal at SurveyMonkey took a look recently, and while he has several interesting findings, he can't really solve the puzzle. The problem is that there are just far too many stories in the news to be able to really know which, if any, are moving voters. What does appear to be the case, however, is that Trump's recovery is in large part due to conservative Republicans who had wavered on coming back to him _ and that a hard core of close to half the electorate still wants no part of the president. It's a good reminder that unless he can find some way to change the basic opinion structure that he's had since his candidacy began, he has an extraordinarily difficult needle to thread in order to win an election.
Of course, he did that _ barely, but that's enough _ in 2016. If he can manage to peak at just the right moment and get lucky with the distribution of his support, he might do it again even with half the nation strongly against him. But I wouldn't want to bet on it, and so far there's not any remote sign that he's interested in appealing to those who might become weak supporters instead of strong opponents.
