Donald Trump’s honeymoon has begun.
In Morning Consult’s final pre-election poll, America disapproved of Donald Trump by a whopping 61 to 37 percent margin. But then America elected him president.
Now, after Trump spent his first two weeks as president-elect settling fraud lawsuits, leveraging the power of his office to fill the rooms of his D.C. hotel, and appointing racists to key White House posts, the mogul’s popularity has soared.
The latest poll from Politico/Morning Consult shows 46 percent of the country now views Trump favorably, while 46 percent take the opposite view.
A net-favorability rating of zero represents a big-league improvement for Trump. But it still leaves him far behind his recent predecessors, including those who, like him, failed to secure a majority of the popular vote.
At this point in 2008, Gallup put Obama’s favorable rating at 68 percent; that figure was 59 percent for George W. Bush in mid-December 2000; and 58 percent for Bill Clinton in November 1992.
A large upswing in popularity has long been a perk of winning the presidency — in 2008, Obama saw his approval soar by 20 points post-election. The fact that Trump’s post-election bounce still doesn’t provide him with a positive approval rating testifies to the American public’s aberrant level of distaste for its new leader.
The Morning Consult poll further suggests that, were the public fully informed of Trump’s recent actions, they might take a dimmer of view of their president-elect. Roughly 60 percent of the country say Trump’s children should have “no role” in his administration, even as they have been serving as members of his transition team.
Trump’s unusual unpopularity is also affirmed in a Pew survey, released Monday. That poll finds that only 30 percent of Americans would give Trump an “A” or “B” for the way he conducted himself during the campaign; for Hillary Clinton, that figure is 43 percent.
This is the first time in the history of Pew’s surveys that the declared winner of a presidential election has received lower marks than his opponent (Bush was not yet the declared winner at the time this survey was taken in 2000).
Trump is so loathed in blue America that nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters want their party leaders to “stand up to Donald Trump” on issues that are important to them, even if it means “less gets done in Washington.” In 2008, only 36 percent of Republican voters said the same about Obama.
In related news, Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote lead over Trump has grown to roughly 1.7 million, giving her a 48 to 46.7 advantage over the president-elect among all voters. That lead is expected to keep growing as more outstanding California ballots get tallied.
