Polls: Can the crisis lift the president’s approval ratings above 50%?
With the United States now leading the world in conf irmed coronavirus cases, Americans finally agree across party lines that the threat cannot be ignored.
More than nine in 10 voters nationwide are concerned about the spread of the virus, according to a Fox News poll released Thursday. And approximately that same share of all Americans consider the pandemic a major threat to the economy, a Pew poll also released Thursday found.
In both cases, Democrats feel this way almost unanimously and Republicans overwhelmingly agree. That bipartisan consensus applies to people’s impressions of their state governments, which have received broadly positive marks in various polls.
But it dries up wherever President Donald Trump is concerned.
As he responds to the pandemic, Trump has seen a small uptick in his approval rating, which hit record highs in surveys released this week by Gallup (49%), Fox (48%), Monmouth University (46%) and Pew (45%).
Still, his approval rating remains stubbornly lodged below 50% across the board. It is a barrier Trump has not been able to breach in most credible polls throughout his term, with Americans on both sides generally steadfast in their feelings about him.
He gets slightly better ratings for his handling of the coronavirus outbreak than for his job performance overall — but even on this, his approval is stuck around the 50yard line. Three-quarters of Democratic voters give his response to the crisis negative marks, according to the Fox poll, while 86% of Republican voters say the opposite.
During times of international conflict or emergency, it is typical for a national leader’s approval ratings to experience a socalled rally effect. Yet while Trump has tried to frame himself as a “wartime president” during the pandemic, this catastrophe is different from most. It has not involved a foreign adversary or a single traumatic event, as wartime crises often do.
From the beginning, it has played out as an unfolding sequence of gradual strategic decisions aimed at what the president calls “the invisible enemy.” As a result, the way that Trump is being graded for his response largely accords with how people already felt about his style of governing.
“People had opinions about this president very early in his administration, and they were strongly held opinions,” Alec Tyson, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, said in an interview. “It’s unlikely that people are just developing opinions about Trump now.”
To the degree that Trump is getting a bump in approval, the Pew poll found it was coming especially from those who consider themselves political independents but lean Republican. His approval rating has leapt 9 percentage points with these Americans since January, when the coronavirus was first detected in the U.S. (Disapproval of Trump also softened slightly among Democrats, though to a lesser degree.)
This group could represent a crucial voting bloc for Trump in the November general election. As partisan Republicans have coalesced around him, he has struggled among some moderate and conservative voters who do not feel an allegiance to the party. If former Vice President Joe Biden wins the Democratic nomination, he is certain to make an aggressive play for many of these voters.
In a sign of how prevalent the virus’ effects are, more than one in 10 voters in the Fox poll said they knew someone who had been infected. And 43% said they or someone in their household had lost work because of the virus, including two-fifths of GOP voters.
Many Americans who might not typically pay close attention to politics may now be looking to Trump and Congress for a solution. Ninety-five percent of voters said they were following virus-related news at least somewhat closely, the Fox poll found. And as Congress pieced together a $2 trillion stimulus package this week, voters’ approval of Congress reached a 10-year high. At just 31%, it’s still dismal — but over the past decade, that number has more typically lingered in the teens.