Pollsters are definitely not herding here . .Ipsos, Pew, Gallup and now Yougov/Economist have him underwater whereas Morning Consult, RMG, Survey USA have him still over 50%.
As I said yesterday, that is much lower approval than Biden enjoyed at this stage of his presidency. Worth noting is the downward change in the various approval polls; Trump is sinking like a rock.
We might say that Trump has a double base of support: the MAGA and the "Illiterati" – the woefully uninformed and disinformed. The latter group makes up a stunningly-large portion of American voters. Large enough that they again handed Trump the presidency.
I don't think he's helping, Dump could have gotten an unnamed hatchet man to do all this but he chose a public Billionaire, i'm guessing for said billionaire's money.
Not exactly unknown or unnamed, but a hatchet man called Peter Thiel is definitely active behind the curtain. (And it’s worth remembering that JD Vance is Peter Thiel’s protégé.)
I would not be surprised if it soon emerges that Musk’s DOGE team is copying massive amounts of federal data and sharing it with Thiel so he can run it through his Palantir analytics software, to guide key personnel decisions.
We’re seeing only the tip of the iceberg of the nature of the ongoing purge of the federal government.
some friends and I were discussing this and our consensus of opinion is mid 30s by Memorial Day and a gop wipeout next year: 20 seats in the House; we are not astute enough to predict the Senate.
Not sure I'd call a 20 seat House gain (which only puts us in the mid-230s) a "GOP wipeout", though it's pretty difficult to see either party breaking through with enough voters to gain enough seats for a political wipeout, and if they did a lot of them would be one-term rentals.
Yeah, with increasingly hardened partisanship from voters, large swings are going to be rarer, even in wave years.
Wiki's page has 69 house seats decided by ten points or less in 2024. Only 23 of those were won by a republican. Only 15 of those 23 were decided by 5 points or less. Of those 23, five were flips of seats we held going into the election. The 20th closest marginal republican held seat was CA-22, which we lost by 6.8 points.
Assuming no major realignments (who knows, at this point) or redestricting changes in our favor, winning an extra 20 seats would require a decent sized wave in our favor. A net gain of 20 seats would put us at 235 — the exact same number we held after 2018.
Some data as an aside:
The bare majority maker seat was PA-07, which we lost by one point. Marginal seats 3-5 are all in PA (7, 10, and 8, in order). Combined with barely losing the senate seat we'd be in a much better position right now if only we did a little bit better in that state.
The distribution of those 23 seats is interesting. Three each in AZ and PA. Two each in IA, CO, and CA. Then one each in NE, MI, VA, WI, NJ, MI, MT, NY, AK, WA, and FL.
Fifty-five percent of voters think Elon Musk has too much power in making decisions affecting the United States, 36 percent think he has about the right amount of power, and 3 percent think he has too little power.
Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low, while 68 percent of voters disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
In today’s poll, 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
Reading the Reuters article, it seems based on the polling that the tariffs are factoring in although certainly Americans are looking at things from a cost standpoint, not always specifically citing tariffs.
And one more thing about Trump's approval: Gallup, which polls presidential approval over blocks of two weeks, gauged it at 45-51 overall for the first half of February, but only 42-54 on the economy. That -12 on the economy is worse than he ever got from them during his first term.
Related to Trump's approval rating that was discussed in yesterday's thread: Ipsos's numbers lout today have it at 44/51.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-rating-slips-americans-worry-about-economy-2025-02-19/
Pollsters are definitely not herding here . .Ipsos, Pew, Gallup and now Yougov/Economist have him underwater whereas Morning Consult, RMG, Survey USA have him still over 50%.
Taking the average, Trump is lower than Biden was at this time in 2021, but higher than he was in February 2017.
Thnx for the context
As I said yesterday, that is much lower approval than Biden enjoyed at this stage of his presidency. Worth noting is the downward change in the various approval polls; Trump is sinking like a rock.
We might say that Trump has a double base of support: the MAGA and the "Illiterati" – the woefully uninformed and disinformed. The latter group makes up a stunningly-large portion of American voters. Large enough that they again handed Trump the presidency.
According to YouGov, Elon Musk is underwater at 42/52. Without Musk to absorb public discontent, Trump's ratings would probably be even worse.
Musk makes for a useful meat shield
I don't think he's helping, Dump could have gotten an unnamed hatchet man to do all this but he chose a public Billionaire, i'm guessing for said billionaire's money.
Not exactly unknown or unnamed, but a hatchet man called Peter Thiel is definitely active behind the curtain. (And it’s worth remembering that JD Vance is Peter Thiel’s protégé.)
I would not be surprised if it soon emerges that Musk’s DOGE team is copying massive amounts of federal data and sharing it with Thiel so he can run it through his Palantir analytics software, to guide key personnel decisions.
We’re seeing only the tip of the iceberg of the nature of the ongoing purge of the federal government.
some friends and I were discussing this and our consensus of opinion is mid 30s by Memorial Day and a gop wipeout next year: 20 seats in the House; we are not astute enough to predict the Senate.
We’re only a month in; I shudder to think what insanity will unfold over the next three
Not sure I'd call a 20 seat House gain (which only puts us in the mid-230s) a "GOP wipeout", though it's pretty difficult to see either party breaking through with enough voters to gain enough seats for a political wipeout, and if they did a lot of them would be one-term rentals.
Yeah, with increasingly hardened partisanship from voters, large swings are going to be rarer, even in wave years.
Wiki's page has 69 house seats decided by ten points or less in 2024. Only 23 of those were won by a republican. Only 15 of those 23 were decided by 5 points or less. Of those 23, five were flips of seats we held going into the election. The 20th closest marginal republican held seat was CA-22, which we lost by 6.8 points.
Assuming no major realignments (who knows, at this point) or redestricting changes in our favor, winning an extra 20 seats would require a decent sized wave in our favor. A net gain of 20 seats would put us at 235 — the exact same number we held after 2018.
Some data as an aside:
The bare majority maker seat was PA-07, which we lost by one point. Marginal seats 3-5 are all in PA (7, 10, and 8, in order). Combined with barely losing the senate seat we'd be in a much better position right now if only we did a little bit better in that state.
The distribution of those 23 seats is interesting. Three each in AZ and PA. Two each in IA, CO, and CA. Then one each in NE, MI, VA, WI, NJ, MI, MT, NY, AK, WA, and FL.
given the nature of the (2020) gerrymandered House a gain of approx 20 seats would put
Dems around the same # of seats they had after 2018 rout. I'll take it!!
Yep in this day and age a 20 seat swing is akin to a "wave" . . Folks forget in 2018 how many "reach" seats the GOP had acquired the prior two cycles.
FWIW, Quinnipiac puts it at 45/49. In January it was 46/43.
https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/us/us02192025_urxu99.pdf
Fifty-five percent of voters think Elon Musk has too much power in making decisions affecting the United States, 36 percent think he has about the right amount of power, and 3 percent think he has too little power.
Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low, while 68 percent of voters disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
In today’s poll, 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
It would be interesting to see what percent think the Democrats control Congress and what they think the Congressional Democrats should do.
Reading the Reuters article, it seems based on the polling that the tariffs are factoring in although certainly Americans are looking at things from a cost standpoint, not always specifically citing tariffs.
And one more thing about Trump's approval: Gallup, which polls presidential approval over blocks of two weeks, gauged it at 45-51 overall for the first half of February, but only 42-54 on the economy. That -12 on the economy is worse than he ever got from them during his first term.
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGkLWwl6XMAA0s5C.png