{"id":40802246022,"date":"2020-03-26T15:42:20","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T19:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/?p=40802246022"},"modified":"2021-01-25T11:22:03","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T16:22:03","slug":"trump-job-rating-bump-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/2020\/03\/26\/trump-job-rating-bump-in-context\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Job Rating \u201cBump\u201d in Context"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Patrick Murray<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fact\n1: Donald Trump\u2019s job rating is at an all-time high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fact\n2: Donald Trump has not received the same approval \u201cbump\u201d as past presidents in\na crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent\nshifts in the president\u2019s job approval have been met with \u201ceither alarms or\nfist pumps,\u201d as one reporter put it to me. \nBut we really have to keep this in context.  We have become so accustomed to the fact that Trump\u2019s\nnumbers never move all that much, that we accept that as the norm. The current\ncrisis is just an exceptionally stark example of that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To\nput this in perspective, if this were any other president, we would expect job\nratings to have swung almost instantaneously by at least 10 points.  George\nW. Bush got a nearly 30 point bump after 9\/11. \nJohn F. Kennedy saw a double-digit hike in his already high ratings\nduring and after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even Jimmy Carter got a 25 point\nbump in 1979 when Americans were taken hostage in Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nMonmouth\u2019s polling<\/a>, Trump\u2019s approval\nrating is only 2 points higher than where it was one month ago, before the\npandemic really spread in the country. And for context, his current rating is 3\npoints higher than two months ago in the midst of his impeachment trial, and 5\npoints higher than six months ago, when the impeachment process was just\ngetting underway.  Monmouth\u2019s numbers\ntrack consistently with the average\nof all polls<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nscale of these shifts means that we end up trying to discern significance from\ninfinitesimal amounts of evidence.  I am\nnot saying that these small movements cannot be consequential. When the country\nis as evenly divided as it is now, they most certainly can be the tipping point\nfor political change. What I am really trying to say is that is it very\ndifficult to explain the reasons for these shifts at the microscopic level of\ndetail many observers want. That\u2019s because standard public opinion polls are\nnot the right tool for the job. They are more like magnifying glasses than\nmicroscopes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s\ntake the recent shift in Monmouth\u2019s poll numbers as an example. The one major\nchange we saw in Trump\u2019s job rating was that approval among Democrats went from\n6% last month to 11% now. The numbers for Republicans (91%) and independents\n(44%) stayed exactly the same. Now, the fact that the latter groups were\nexactly the same in the poll does not mean they are exactly the same in reality,\nbecause of the potential margin of error in the poll sample. It\u2019s just that we\nknow they did not move as much (if at all) as the Democrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A\nfive percentage point movement among a group that makes up about a third of the\npopulation is microscopic in polling terms. Absent a sample size in the tens of\nthousands, we just don\u2019t have the ability to examine this group with any level of\nprecision. In real terms, this shift may represent about 3 or 4 million adults\nacross the country. In polling terms, this equates to approximately 15 respondents\nin a sample of 850).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nis likely that this group had a range of reasons for changing their opinion.\nFor some it was probably movement from soft disapproval to soft approval for a\nspecific thing Trump had done. For others it may be aspirational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s\na body of literature about the psychological need to rally around a leader in\ntimes of crisis, which is why the bigger research question for a student of\npublic opinion is why that effect isn\u2019t bigger right now rather than finding\nexplanations for the few people who have become more positive toward the\npresident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part\nof the explanation is certainly down to Trump\u2019s inability to project a more\ninclusive, non-partisan persona as well as a steady hand on how his administration\nis tackling this situation. Part of the explanation is the failure of\nopposition leaders to signal to their followers that they should get behind the\npresident (which admittedly is difficult for them to do as Trump\u2019s rhetoric\ncontinues to lambast those who don\u2019t show due deference to him).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Basically,\nthe current times are blowing away a lot of the political theories about what\ntypically happens in a time of crisis. \nAnd that, to me, is the more important public opinion story right now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Patrick Murray Fact 1: Donald Trump\u2019s job rating is at an all-time high. Fact 2: Donald Trump has not received the same approval \u201cbump\u201d as past presidents in a crisis. Recent shifts in the president\u2019s job approval have been met with \u201ceither alarms or fist pumps,\u201d as one reporter put it to me.  But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40802246022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802246022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40802246022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802246022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40802246024,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802246022\/revisions\/40802246024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40802246022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40802246022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40802246022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}