The recent recovery of President Trump’s approval numbers — likely due to the fact that he was out of the country for more than a week — appears to have been short-lived. The latest national daily-tracking poll from Gallup is out, and Trump has once again dropped to a negative-20-point differential between voters who approve of his performance as president (37 percent) and those who disapprove (57 percent). These daily-tracking results can be noisy, and it’s not even the president’s worst-ever performance in the poll, but it’s tied for his fourth worst and is the lowest rating he’s received since late March. (His approval bump was not widely reflected in non-Gallup polls in the first place either.)
The results, which are based on a three-day polling average, also may not yet reflect the full reaction to Trump’s decision on Thursday to yank the U.S. out of the historic Paris Agreement to combat climate change. As FiveThirtyEight pointed out on Friday, that move is unlikely to be popular beyond Trump’s core supporters:
An overwhelming majority of Democrats (87 percent) and a clear majority of independents (61 percent) wanted the U.S. to stay in the climate agreement, according to a poll that was released in April and conducted jointly by Politico and Harvard’s School of Public Health. Overall, 62 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to remain part of the accord (among Republicans, 56 percent favored withdrawal). A survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication concluded that a majority of Americans in every state wanted the U.S. to remain in the Paris agreement.
So in the simplest terms, Trump’s move was broadly unpopular. All else being equal, that tends to be bad politics.
