Dismal rating for Trump not all-time low

Some have done worse than 57 percent disapproval in state

Two-thirds of California voters disapprove of President Trump’s job performance — but, believe it or not, that’s not the lowest a modern president has fallen in the Golden State.

A poll released Tuesday by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies found the president’s ratings are worse than several polls earlier this year, and similar to a May poll from the Public Policy Institute of California that had Trump at 27 percent approval and 67 percent disapproval.

“Disapproval of the job Trump is doing is not only broad but also very deep,” said Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director, noting that 57 percent of respondents said they strongly disapproved of the commander-in-chief and only 30 percent give him a thumbs up. “It’s a very dismal set of numbers for him.”

The president faces a gaping partisan gap in California. Only five percent of Democrats approve of his performance, while 93 percent disapprove. Independents are down on him as well, with 30 percent approving and 64 percent disapproving. Meanwhile, 73 percent of Republicans back Trump, and just 23 percent disapprove of him.

But even Republicans aren’t in love with Trump’s governing style. Seventy percent of GOP voters said they approved of him because of his policies, while 11 percent said it was because of his way of governing and 19 percent liked both. Most Democrats disliked him both for his policies and his governing.

A majority of Californians of every race, age group, and region of the state disapproves of the former real estate tycoon.

Still, Trump isn’t quite California’s most hated president in recent history. His poll numbers haven’t reached the doldrums of California’s own Richard Nixon, who hit 24 percent approval and 70 percent disapproval in August 1974, right before he resigned amid the Wa-

tergate scandal while facing impeachment. George W. Bush scraped the bottom at 24 percent approval and 71 percent disapproval in July 2008, as the U.S. economy started going south and the Iraq War stretched on.

Of course, it hasn't been even a year into Trump's presidency — it took Nixon

five and a half years and W. almost eight years to reach their nadirs.

And there's another peculiarity with Trump: Usually, presidential approval numbers correlate strongly with how well the economy is doing, with voters scoring their leaders more favorably in boom years. But that's not the case in 2017, as Trump flounders in the polls and the U.S. economy picks up steam. “Clearly, he's the exception,” DiCamillo said.

The only presidents since Nixon who never saw their California approval ratings go underwater were Barack Obama, whose lowest numbers — 46 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval — came in September 2011, and native son Ronald Reagan, who never dipped below 53 percent approval and 47 percent disapproval, in March 1982.

The Berkeley poll, which was conducted between Dec. 7 and 16, used Englishand Spanish-speaking interviewers and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.