Don has just reached a negative disapproval rating faster than ANY other person holding the office of president in recent decades. According to Gallup, yesterday Don hit a 51% disapproval rating, something he achieved in ONLY EIGHT DAYS!! Well, he did say he'd be amazing—we just didn't realise he meant amazingly bad.
The chart above if from Statista, which specialises in data visualisation and is neither political nor partisan. It compares Don's terrible performance with other recent presidents, and tells the story even more starkly than the words alone.
When President Obama left office, he had a strong 59% approval rating, which was among the highest for recent US presidents. Only Clinton (66%) and Reagan (63%) had higher final ratings, while Eisenhower (59%) and Kennedy (58%) were similar.
However, and like all presidents, President Obama had low times, too, and because of those low rating periods, he left office with an overall average job approval rating of 47.9%, and only Truman, Ford, and Carter had lower rating averages.
Approval ratings are, like all polls, snapshots, and the averages over time present once sort of portrait of a presidency. For as long as Don remains titular president, he'll have ups and downs, and he’ll probably sometimes have majority approval, too. Still, at the moment, he must be wistful about those heady days when he first assumed the title of president and was faced with an even split—45% approved and 45% disapproved of Don on Inauguration Day. Sure, that was record high disapproval ratings at the time, and his approval rating on Inauguration Day was by far the worst since Gallup started polling, but that means he can only go up, right?
Of course! On January 28, Gallup had him at a whopping 51% approval! Will that turn out to be the high point of his tenure? Personally, I doubt it, particularly as his gang manipulates events in ways that, they believe, will drive popularity. Maybe they’ll be right. Or, maybe Don has already seen the maximum height of his popularity and it’s all downhill from here. Which it turns out to be will ultimately determine how soon we’re rid of him, and which party controls Congress in 2018.
So, we can all be forgiven a bit of schadenfreude at Don’s miserable—yuge! bigly bad!—performance in the polls. We all hope it translates into stopping him and his agenda. That, however, requires more than gloating.
It’s time to get busy.
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