Ex-President, that is
I’ve been saying that Trump is the gift that keeps on giving for Democratic electoral hopes for quite some time. If he had shut his pie hole for a few months he probably would have helped bot the GOP and his own standing. But he can’t do that:
The revived political hopes of Democrats heading into the midterm election are due, in no small part, to this fundamental political reality: Donald Trump is very, very unpopular.
While Trump never really left the political stage — thanks to his ongoing attempts to dispute the 2020 election — his profile has increased as of late in the wake of the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home that turned up classified documents from when he left the White House in 2021.
That is a very bad thing for Republicans. While Trump remains extremely popular among the Republican base, he is decidedly unpopular among the general electorate.
The latest NBC News poll tells the story. Just 34% of registered voters nationally said they had a positive view of Trump, while 54% said they had a negative view. But even those topline numbers gloss over how unpopular the former President actually is. While 1 in 5 voters said they felt “very positive” about him, almost half (46%) said they felt “very negative” — a massive disparity. (By comparison, 42% of voters viewed President Joe Biden positively, while 47% viewed him negatively.)
And NBC’s results are far from the only poll showing that reality for Republicans. A Quinnipiac University poll from August echoed the NBC results, with 34% of registered voters viewing Trump favorably and 57% viewing him unfavorably.
What’s interesting about those numbers is that they are largely unchanged from where Trump stood with the public when he left office. For example, a Gallup poll conducted in January 2021 showed that 34% of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, while 62% disapproved. (The poll was in the field during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.)
Usually, presidents’ poll numbers begin to improve once they leave office — as people tend to remember the good things about their tenure and forget the bad stuff as time passes. That hasn’t happened for Trump, for two big reasons:
1) He’s never really stepped off the national stage.
2) January 6 was such a cataclysm that people haven’t forgotten it.
Given Trump’s poor polling numbers, the best thing for his party — if he was concerned, first and foremost, about his party — would be for him to lay low over the next seven weeks. That would give Republicans their best possible chance to frame the midterms as a pure referendum on Biden and the Democrats who control the House and Senate, rather than a choice between Biden and Trump.
Trump’s approval rating is as low as it was on January 7th. That’s pretty amazing. If it wasn’t such a horrible train wreck for the country and the world I might even enjoy the cage match that’s coming between Trump and his cult and the rest of the GOP field. With those approval numbers it’s almost inevitable that he will garner some primary opponents.
Update:
The share of Republicans who choose loyalty to former President Donald Trump over the Republican Party has dropped to its lowest level since the NBC News poll began asking about it, according to new numbers from the survey.
Just 33% of registered Republican voters in the new poll view themselves more a “supporter of Donald Trump” over the Republican Party. By comparison, 58% say they view themselves as a “supporter of the Republican Party.” Just 3% say both and 4% say neither.
Keep in mind that that 33% has veto power over the GOP. They are probably stuck with him whether they like it or not. That doesn’t mean ambitious GOPers won’t try to usurp him anyway.