Trump hangs on to core support
WASHINGTON — Few chief executives have been as alone as President Donald Trump appears now — shunned by major business leaders, at odds with his party’s congressional leadership and deeply estranged from more than half the nation.
Polls taken in the past week, since Trump made comments that seemed to make excuses for neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., have shown the negative reaction.
But they’ve also demonstrated that Trump continues to hold the support of a hard core of backers.
They are not as numerous as the group that voted for Trump in November; their ranks have eroded steadily since he took office. Trump’s support, however, remains big enough to threaten Republican elected officials who might be tempted to openly break with the president. Potentially, it could also serve as a political base from which he could bounce back.
The latest evidence comes from three surveys done for NBC News that were released Sunday by the polling unit at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The surveys polled residents of the three states that put Trump over the top last year: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Among people who voted for him last year, 23 percent in Wisconsin, 19 percent in Pennsylvania and 16 percent in Michigan now do not approve of his performance in office, the polls found.
Roughly 1 in 5 Trump voters in each of the three states chose “embarrassed” when asked how his conduct in office makes them feel.
Those defections dwarf the size of Trump’s margin over Hillary Clinton in those three states, which ranged from eight-tenths of a point in Pennsylvania to two-tenths of a point in Michigan.
“Residents are clearly dissatisfied in how candidate Trump transitioned into President Trump,” Lee Miringoff, the director of the poll, wrote in describing his results.
The polls can tell us more about next year’s midterm elections. The party in the White House almost always loses seats in a president’s first midterm election. The issue for 2018 will be how many: Democrats, who hold 194 seats in the House, would need to pick up 24 for a majority.
Political scientists have found that two polling measures typically have provided good guidance on how midterm elections will go. One is a president’s job approval. The other is a question asking voters which party they’d like to see win — a so-called generic ballot.
On both scores, Republicans sit in risky territory.
Trump’s approval fell below 40 percent in polling averages last month, during the Senate debate on repealing the Affordable Care Act.
At 40 percent approval, Trump would be a drag on his party’s efforts to hold onto its House majority. If his approval consistently drops below that level into the mid-30s, the drag would likely be fatal to GOP hopes.