Poll: Trump approval edges up in Florida
Florida voters remain deeply divided over President Donald Trump, but he’s enjoying his highest approval rating since he took office.
A Florida Atlantic University Poll scheduled for release today found 43 percent approve and 45 percent disapprove of Trump’s performance, a net negative of 2 percentage points. Positives for the president:
■ Florida voters’ views of the president continue to improve. In the last FAU poll, conducted in February, Trump’s performance had 41 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval, a net negative of 3 points. In November, Trump had 41 percent approval and 47 percent disapproval, a net negative of 6 points.
■ His Florida numbers continue to outpace his national numbers, which have also been rising. The RealClearPolitics average of national polls, which includes 12 surveys, show his approval at 43 percent and his disapproval at 53 percent, a net negative of 10 percentage points.
■ Republicans running in the 2018 election could benefit from Trump’s improved
standing.
“The presumption was that the president’s low approval ratings were going to pull down Republicans. And if his approval ratings continue to trend upwards, that downward pull on the Republican ticket will not be nearly as strong as the Democrats were hoping,” said Kevin Wagner, an FAU political scientist and research fellow at the polling initiative.
“I don’t know that there’s evidence that he’s all of a sudden going to be super popular. [But] that’s a sign that Republicans might not be having as bad a year as some might have thought,” he said.
Negatives for the president:
The state’s voters prefer former President Barack Obama over Trump. Asked who they’d rather have as president, 49 percent picked Obama; 43 percent said Trump.
As with most poll questions related to Trump, big differences surface based on gender and political affiliation. Among women, 53 percent said they’d prefer Obama as president; among men, 44 percent said they’d rather have Obama than Trump. For Democrats, 80 percent would prefer Obama and among Republicans, 79 percent said they’d rather have Trump.
Voters aren’t wild about Trump’s only major domestic accomplishment since taking office, the Republican tax cuts the president signed into law in December. Just 29 percent said the tax law has helped them financially, 19 percent said the tax law has hurt them and 52 percent said it has made no difference.
Men were more positive about the tax cut, with 36 percent saying they were helped, than women, with just 23 percent said they were helped. Among men, 47 percent said it made no difference and among women 56 percent said it made no difference. Republicans were also much happier with the tax cut (44 percent said they were helped) than Democrats (16 percent said they were helped).
The poll from the Florida Atlantic University Business and Economics Polling Initiative was conducted Friday through Monday during one of the most tumultuous weeks of the Trump presidency, with new revelations about the president’s payment to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels and additional movement aimed at reducing nuclear tensions with North Korea.
In November 2016, Trump won the state’s 29 electoral voters with 49 percent of the vote. Hillary Clinton received 47.8 percent.
The deep divisions over Trump haven’t changed much since then. FAU surveys found that Trump had a net negative of 6 points in November, 10 percentage points in August, 9 percentage points in June and 2 percentage points in March 2017.
The biggest change during the course of Trump’s presidency has been the dramatic decline in the percentage of Florida voters who were undecided. In March 2017, when Trump was well known but still new to the job, he had 36 percent approval and 38 percent disapproval — with a total of 26 percent who were neutral or didn’t have an opinion. In the latest survey just 12 percent don’t have a view.
The survey of 1,000 Florida registered voters was conducted online and through automated calls to people with landline telephones. The FAU Business and Economics Polling Initiative said it had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Breakdowns for smaller groups, such as men, women, Democrats and Republicans, have higher margins of error.
Monica Escaleras, director of the FAU Business and Economics Polling Initiative, said the final poll results were weighted in an attempt to more accurately reflect gender, party affiliation, ethnicity and education.