For nearly four years, Trump’s approval ratings have been extraordinarily stable, ranging between 30 and 40 years. Trump’s denial of the election results and the resignation of the Capitol, however, managed to do what a failed effort to revoke Obamacare, white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, impeachment and other scandals could not: erode his once-durable support for new lows.
Trump’s downfall means that he will leave the Oval Office historically unpopular compared to most of his predecessors. Instead of becoming a popular figure, Trump is set to join George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon as presidents who have come out with significant majorities disapproving his performance at work.
Already almost universally despised by Democratic voters, much of the drop in Trump’s polls came from Republicans and independents. Three out of four self-identified Republican Party voters still approve of the work Trump is doing as president – 75 percent – but that is less than 83 percent in the final POLITICO / Morning Consult poll of 2020, conducted in December.
The drop among independents was similar: less than three out of ten independent voters now approve of Trump – 29%, down from 38% in December.
The POLITICO / Morning Consult poll was conducted from January 8 to 11, while Congress was preparing to start the impeachment process against Trump. The survey interviewed 1,996 registered voters online. The sampling error margin is plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The same research, in results released earlier this week showed that voters are divided over whether Congress should launch an impeachment process in the final week of Trump’s presidency.
Other polls since the violent Capitol insurrection last week also show declining approval ratings for Trump. On a Quinnipiac University Research on Monday, only 33% of voters approved the way Trump was conducting his job as president, up from 44% the previous month. AN PBS NewsHour / Marist College Research, conducted a day after the attack on the Capitol, showed that Trump’s approval rating among all Americans was 38 percent, 5 points below December.
To be sure, national polls underestimated Trump’s performance in the national election, which he lost by 4 percentage points after losing on the RealClearPolitics average by 7 points and on the FiveThirtyEight average by 8 points.
But the latest polls conducted last week show significant drops in support for Trump compared to previous measurements – with one notable exception: Rasmussen reports. Republican-oriented automated research, which usually produced more solid results for Trump, showed that the president’s approval ratings were largely unaffected by last week’s events. (Rasmussen’s Twitter account last month shared some of the discredited electoral conspiracies that fueled the pro-Trump demonstrations last week, including one that infamous quote the Soviet despot Joseph Stalin.)
Trump’s final approval rating is far from established, given Congress’s race to challenge him in the week that his presidency ended. But he is about to drop as one of the most unpopular presidents on leaving office.
Barack Obama’s approval rating has increased in the final weeks of his presidency, after Trump’s frustrating victory in the 2016 election. RealClearPolitics AverageObama’s approval rating ended at 57 percent, rising about 5 points between the election and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.
Trump should end closer to Bush’s final ratings: 34 percent in the final Gallup Search – the best historical record for modern presidential approval – and 29 percent at the close RealClearPolitics Average.
But Bush’s father, George HW Bush, the last president to be deposed by voters after a term, recovered after the election in a way that Trump did not. The older Bush’s approval rating dropped to 32% in the run for the 1992 election, according to Gallup, but ended up with 56% in the final poll before Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
Clinton and Ronald Reagan ended with a 63 percent pass rate in the Gallup poll. Trump’s presidency is ending more like Carter’s: the Georgian’s final approval rating before yielding the Oval Office to Reagan was 34%.
No president has left the post more unpopular than Nixon, who had a 24% approval rating in Gallup’s final poll before his resignation in August 1974. But ordinary Republicans turned against Nixon more than against Trump. In the final Gallup poll, 38% of Republicans disapproved of Nixon’s performance in office, compared with 23% who disapproved of Trump in the new POLITICO / Morning Consult poll.
Morning Consult is a global data intelligence company, providing insights into what people think in real time, searching tens of thousands around the world every day..
More details on voting and its methodology can be found in these two documents: Toplines | Crosstabs