Citizens moves to control repair work
Insurer says contractor list is designed to reduce fraud
State-run Citizens Property Insurance Corp. is deploying a new weapon in its fight against mounting claims costs and abuses.
Effective July 1, new and renewing Citizens policies will include language providing customers with access to Citizens’ network of approved repair contractors.
Citizens wants to control the claims handling process — from taking damage reports from policyholders to sending out repair contractors. The company has long contended that too many independent contractors, primarily from South Florida, are defrauding the company by persuading policyholders to sign over the rights to their claims, then submitting inflated bills and filing lawsuits.
Legislation Citizens had hoped would reduce abuses failed for the fifth consecutive year in Tallahassee.
Under its new “Managed Repair Contractor Network Program,” Citizens will provide a contractor to perform repairs “at our option and with your consent,” the new policy language states.
Citizens spokesman Michael Peltier said the program will be initially focused
WASHINGTON— President Donald Trump’s standing in national polls has consistently declined since the end of last month. His approval rating now sits at the lowest point of his presidency.
Here are some questions and answers about what the polls do — and don’t — tell us.
Q: How significant is Trump’s slide?
A: At the end of April, the share of Americans who disapproved of Trump’s job in office outnumbered those who approved by about 8 percentage points in polling averages. That gap has now doubled.
The percentage who approve of Trump’s job performance is now below 40 percent in the two major polling averages, done by Real Clear Politics and The Huffington Post. He’s at the lowest level of his presidency and far lower than any previous president at this point.
Q: What do the most recent polls show?
A: Surveys in the last week range from Gallup’s tracking poll, which shows 37 percent of Americans approving of Trump’s job performance and 56 percent disapproving, to a Rasmussen poll of people deemed likely to vote in 2018 that has 44 percent-56 percent. Surveys by all the major polling organizations show roughly the same downward trend in Trump’s approval.
Q: What’s driving Trump’s numbers down?
A: We don’t really know. Polls, as snapshots in time, can’t readily track people’s reasons for changing their minds. But the timing gives us some clues.
Trump’s slide began around the time the House started to debate the latest version of the GOP health care bill. We know from separate polling that Trumpcare, as Democrats call it, is unpopular.
Odds are that the health care bill has played a big role in Trump’s slide.
Firing FBI Director James Comey and the appointment of Robert Mueller III special counsel to oversee the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election surely didn’t help Trump’s standing. But while those events got a lot of headlines, the voters who follow that kind of news tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to politics. Most of them already have strong opinions of Trump and aren’t likely to change.
Health care, by contrast, touches the lives of a lot of people who don’t pay attention to politics. They’re the voters more likely to change their minds.
Q: What do we know about who has turned against him?
A: Compared with his showing in late April, Trump has lost ground among self-identified independents and, to some degree, self-identified Republicans. His standing among self-identified Democrats is so low in most polls that it doesn’t change much any more.
Trump remains more popular with older Americans, especially those older than 65, than with those younger than 45. And he’s more popular with whites than minorities.
In polling by SurveyMonkey, which collects large samples that allow detailed analysis, Trump’s support has dropped 10 percentage points since late April among white voters who did not go to college — a group that was key to his victory last fall. That’s a potentially worrisome development for Trump.
Trump lost 6 percentage points among white college graduates, and his standing among nonwhites, which was already low, did not change significantly.
Q: Trump was unpopular in the fall, but got elected anyway. Does his standing in polls matter?
A: Yes, especially to members of Congress.
In the fall, Trump was running against a Democrat, Hillary Clinton, who was also unpopular. A significant bloc of voters disliked both of them, and a majority of those voters made up their minds for Trump.
The situation has changed: Now polls are a straight-up gauge of Trump’s standing, andhe, of course, won’t face voters again until 2020. But members of the House, and one-third of the Senate, will be up for election in just over 17 months.
Historically, when presidents are unpopular, voters in midterm elections turn to candidates of the opposing party to act as a check on the White House.
Q: Don’t polls have a bad record of tracking Trump’s support?
A: No, they really don’t. In November, most national polls were quite close on the popular vote, which is all a poll can forecast.
There were a handful of states in which polls were off by a few points. As luck would have it, theywere off by just enough in just enough states to get the outcome wrong. That led a lot of election handicappers astray, but it doesn’t mean that somehow polls can’t measure Trump’s support.
Also, even if you assume the polls are off by a few points, as some of the state polls were in November, Trump’s support would still be at a historically lowlevel.