WASHINGTON – Donald Trump is the only president in US history to face two charges – this time for his role in inciting a deadly attack on the Capitol by his supporters – but he is still about to step down with a job approval rating. quite typical of all his time in office.
A new NBC News poll found that 43 percent of voters across the country gave Trump a positive job approval rating, just below the 45 percent who said the same before the November election and the 44 percent who approved his performance shortly after he took office in 2017.
The same poll found that 35% of voters – including 74% of Republicans, but only 30% of independents and 3% of Democrats – believe that President-elect Joe Biden did not win the 2020 elections legitimately.
Sixty-one percent of all voters – but only 21% of Republicans – say that Biden legitimately won.
While a record 10 Republicans in the House broke through the ranks to vote for the president’s impeachment last week, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans in the poll shows little sign that Republican Party voters are largely disillusioned with the president.
Nearly 9 out of 10 Republicans – 87 percent – approve of Trump, compared with 89 percent who said the same before the November election.
And even for half of Republicans who say they prioritize the Republican Party in general over loyalty to Trump, its high approval remains unmoved by recent events.
Among Republicans who say their main loyalty is to Trump towards the party, 98% approve of his performance. For those who say they prioritize the party over the president, their approval is still 81 percent – virtually unchanged since October 2020. (These findings contrast with some other recent national surveys showing Trump’s lowest job rating., The NBC poll surveyed registered voters.)
In the NBC poll, nearly a third of the Republican Party voters surveyed – 28% – said that Trump’s words and actions related to the Capitol violence on January 6 actually reinforced his vote for Trump.
Only 5 percent said they now regret their support for him, and a whopping two-thirds – 66 percent – said their feelings about Trump have not changed.
While 52 percent of voters generally say that Trump is solely or primarily responsible for the protests that led rebels to take over the Capitol, including 91 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of independents, only 11 percent of Republicans agree. (About half of Republicans, however, attribute responsibility to “social media companies” and “Antifa”.)
“Although some Republican elected officials have broken with Trump, Republican voters are with him for now,” said Democratic researcher Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research, who conducted the research with Republican researcher Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies. “As we have seen throughout his tenure, an important event after an important event does little to shake Trump’s position with Republicans.”
Trump’s position among those outside the GOP remains similarly unchanged. He gets a positive job evaluation of 44 percent of independents and just 5 percent of Democrats in the last poll, actions that are also almost identical to pre-election polls.
Previous NBC polls have in fact shown that Trump’s approval among voters is remarkably stable, despite his tumultuous presidency, ranging only between a maximum of 47% and a minimum of 38%.
The last ranking came in late 2017, after Trump was widely criticized for his response to the violence after a meeting of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Half of voters call Trump “worse than most” presidents
About half of the electorate – 49% of voters – rated Trump as “definitely worse than most” presidents, a portion recently rivaled only by the 48% who said the same about President George W. Bush’s departure in late 2008 .
Another 9% say Trump “is not as good as most”.
Forty percent of voters rate Trump as “one of the best” presidents (19%) or “better than most” (21%). This is significantly lower than the majorities that gave above-average ratings to Bill Clinton (56 percent) or Barack Obama (55 percent) when they left office.
But Trump’s lukewarm assessment still doubles the mere 20% of voters who gave Bush an above-average rating when he left the White House in 2009.
The outgoing president’s legacy, as well as the vision of his performance throughout his presidency, is defined by rigid party lines.
Those who see Trump’s presidency as “better than most” or “one of the best” include 82% of Republicans, but only 40% of independents and only 4% of Democrats.
When ex-presidents Obama and Clinton stepped down while enjoying relatively high approval ratings, a larger share of those from the opposite party – 20% and 27% of Republicans, respectively – rated their presidencies as above average.
Biden and Harris improve Trump on the favorability scale
While the poll shows Trump’s personal favorability ratings underwater, Democrats going to the White House do better.
President-elect Biden has a net favorability rating of +4 (44% positive, 40% negative), while Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has a net rating of +0 (41% positive, 41% negative).
This is compared to Trump’s personal net rating of -13 (40 percent positive, 53 percent negative).
Joe Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, has a personal favorability rating of +14 (40 percent positive, 26 percent negative). Notably, however, the majority of Republicans – 59 percent – give it a negative rating, a particularly high marker of dislike for a first lady joining members of the opposite party.
Prior to Obama’s inauguration, 33% of Republicans gave Michelle Obama a negative personal assessment. And before Trump’s inauguration, 44 percent of Democrats gave Melania Trump an equally low score.
The NBC News poll of 1,000 registered voters was conducted from 10 to 13 January 2021 by the Republican company Public Opinion Strategies and the Democratic company Hart Research. The margin of error for registered voters is +/- 3.1 percentage points.