Trump poll numbers on par
A story on Facebook celebrates President Donald Trump’s approval rating and boasts that it is better than two of his predecessors, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan.
“Trump approval rating better than Obama and Reagan at same point in their presidencies,” said a June 9 headline on The Gateway Pundit, a proTrump website.
The story said that Trump’s approval rating is at 45%, which it claims is nearly equal to Obama and Reagan at the same point of their presidencies.
Facebook users flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook’s News Feed.
Is it true? We looked at the polls cited in the story as well as additional polls to provide a more complete picture.
We found that The Gateway Pundit cited the early June polls that were the most favorable to Trump: a Fox News poll showed that 45% of respondents approved of Trump while Rasmussen Reports showed 47% approval for Trump.
A compilation of polls by Real Clear Politics in early June showed that five other polls, including Gallup, all had slightly less favorable results for Trump.
For Obama, The Gateway Pundit cited a Rasmussen poll that showed Obama’s approval was at 46% on June 9, 2010. Some experts have raised questions about Rasmussen’s polls, because they are based on likely voters, which is a smaller sample than most other polls; historically, Rasmussen has tended to report more favorable results for Republicans generally and Trump in particular. So we looked at one other poll from the same time, Gallup, and also found Obama had the same approval rating.
We also found the comparison between Trump, Obama and Reagan in a story about a poll by NBC News and the Wall
Street Journal. The story said that Trump’s approval was 44% in early June, matching the results for Reagan (in June 1982) and Obama (in June 2010) “before both presidents saw their parties lose a significant number of House seats in the midterms.” Historically, the president’s party usually gets shellacked during the midterms.
The Gateway Pundit did not cite this NBC/WSJ poll, which has some warning signs for Republicans in general, including that Democrats were far more enthusiastic than Republicans about the upcoming midterms. Also, 48% of voters indicate they’re more likely to support a congressional candidate who promises to provide a check on Trump, compared with 23% who say they’re less likely to support such a candidate.
Karlyn Bowman, a polling specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, cautioned against drawing conclusions about what the polls in early June mean for the midterm election in November.
“Although polls have more predictive value as we get closer to election day, we are still more than 100 days out,” she said.
Steven Smith, a Washington University political scientist, said there is considerable variation in presidential job approval ratings across survey organizations. These differences are due to variation in sampling frames, question wordings, weighting, and other factors.
“Consequently, claims like the Gateway Pundit claim that depend on differences of a few percentage points using different survey organizations’ findings are questionable. The comparisons simply are not reliable,”