The 5 Paths Forward for Trump’s Popularity

With the 2018 midterm election behind us, and two years to go until Trump’s reelection or defeat, it is a good time to establish some parameters around what we can expect from the public’s support or disapproval of the president going forward. This will help us interpret changes in his approval rating, or lack thereof, as they are happening. There are five paths Trump’s popularity may take over the next two years.

Path 1: Same old-Same old 

This path assumes that Trump’s approval rating in the last half of his term will behave the same way it did during the first half. Here is what we can expect for the average approval dip:

• They will occur 3 weeks (and no more than 8 weeks) after the previous one
• They will last about 4 weeks
• They will have a decline of about 1.5 to 2 points
• On the severity scale, a little more than half will rank in the 6-10 range, and a little less than half rank in the 1-5 range
• Trump’s approval rating will stay between 38-42%, perhaps going lower or higher for brief periods

This path assumes that the four factors that have resulted in Trump’s approval decline-White House policy, White House chaos, Trump taboos, and the Russia investigation–will continue to affect public thinking in the same way they have up to now.

Path 2: Treading Water

An approval dip is characterized by a significant drop in approval, or incremental drops sustained over a number of weeks. When Trump is not in an approval dip, his rating bobs around, dropping half a point one week, gaining a point the next, dropping half a point again the week after that. For example, here are Trump’s approval ratings for each of the 8 weeks leading up to the midterms:

He gains ground then loses some, on repeat. For most of 2018 Trump’s approval has been bobbing between 40-42%. He has a ceiling somewhere between 42-43%. But he also has a floor of about 40%, having only dipped down to 39.9% for a few days this year (this happened last summer during Episode 12,  when Cohen and Manafort took plea deal and John McCain died).

So the Treading Water path assumes that Trump’s dips will happen mush less frequently and will represent shallower approval declines, but also that Trump will not break much above his 42% ceiling either. There is some evidence that it is getting easier for him to maintain this kind of approval. In 2017, dips were occurring about every 2.2 weeks, while this year they occur about ever 4.2 weeks. In 2017 the average decline was 2.5 points, while in 2018 the average decline was 1.1 points.

It is hard to say what accounts for this because the negative news cycles that drive the approval dips have been just as dire in 2018 as they were in 2017. Other than the incidents mentioned above, they include: Stormy Daniels payments; multiple Mueller indictments; bipartisan condemnation of the child-separation policy; the Putin summit in Helsinki; White House chaos stories from Omarosa and Woodward. It is possible that the public has grown so numb to Trump antics that breaking news coverage about those antics have had less power to shock than it did during Trump’s first year in office. The result is that people are paying less attention, or they are less likely to voice disapproval because a certain level of dislike for Trump’s antics are now baked into the public’s conception of how they think about Trump’s performance. If this is the case, it will make it easier for Trump to tread water at 42% in his third year.

Path 3: Normalization

Below are the average approval ratings for the previous four presidents during their third year in office.

• Obama: 44%
• Bush (43): 60.5%
• Clinton: 47.5%
• Bush (41): 73%

The average of these is 56.3%, which is close to the average (57.5%) for all presidential first terms going back to Truman. But sticking with these four recent presidents, let’s subtract the Bushes who’s approval was inflated due to popular wars that happened in their respective third years. This leaves a non-war third year approval rating of 45.75%.

Trump has never achieved a 45% approval rating. The only time he was at 44% was during the first four weeks of his term. So if Trump’s approval goes above 45% we will know that the public writ large is giving its approval to his presidency in the same measure as other presidents, hence they will be treating Trump as a normal president. What might cause this?

The first possibility is that Trump begins to behave more like a normal president, or he at least tones it down enough that the public begins to accept him as normal.

Another possibility is that Trump will not change but will successfully cast the events of the next two years as normal partisan politics. One advantage he will gain is a clear political opponent: the Democratic-controlled House. Before now, by any reasonable and traditional understanding of our political system, Trump was responsible for just about everything because he and his party controlled the entire federal government. When things went wrong there was nowhere else to look for blame but Trump. He often tried to deflect that blame onto the Democrats (for Obamacare repeal failure, immigration laws, wall funding, even his own child-separation policy), but this was not taken seriously by the media because the Democrats had no power in Congress. In almost all cases, Trump had failed to lead his own party and in many cases is own administration. That changes starting in 2019. The media will not be able to cast its critical eye exclusively on Trump and his “lackeys” in Congress, but reporters and pundits will be able to pick apart the decisions, statements and gaffs of Nancy Pelosi and her committee chairmen like Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings and Jerry Nadler, not to mention lower ranking rabble rousers like Maxine Waters. Trump will not be able to saddle them with all the blame for negative events, but the media and the public will hold Democrats at least partly to account for the power that they do wield. The public will perceive the partisan back-and-forth as normal politics, thus elevating Trump to the same plane as “normal” presidents who battled with Congress like Clinton or Obama.

Having a live opponent will also recast the approval-disapproval question. With Trump on stage all by himself, it is a straightforward answer. But when he is standing beside empowered Democrats, personified by Pelosi or whoever the Speaker will be, some percentage of the public who may disapprove of Trump in a given week will instead tell pollsters they approve because they do not want their disapproval to be construed as support for Democrats.

Path 4: Cratering

Trump’s lowest approval rating is around 36%, which he reached twice: after Charlottesville, and after the Flynn guilty plea and Roy Moore campaign. Dropping into the mid-to-low 30s, or even dropping his baseline from the low 40s to the mid 30s would constitute a cratering approval rating. For most of 2017, he was between 37-38%, so being lower than that for a sustained period would be unprecedented for him and suggest something has shifted in how the public perceives his job performance.

This may result from the normal things that have caused presidential approval to drop, such as a national disaster of his own making or not. Or it could be the reverse of the numbing effect described in Path 2. Trump’s attempts to make excuses for or divert attention from his problems may stop working. Instead of accepting that “Trump is gonna Trump” a chunk of the population that has so far given him the benefit of the doubt may decide they have had enough and move into the permanently disapprove camp.

Path 5: Bottom Falls Out

In the last 12 months of Nixon’s presidency his approval rating averaged out to 26.8%. The year before, his average was 51.7%. Over an eight month period in 1973 he dropped from 65% to 29%. So Nixon went from having the support of well over half of the country to losing a full half of his support.

If Trump lost half of his support he would be in the low 20s, which is unlikely given the strength of his base support and the partisan divide in the country, which did not exist in the Nixon era. My hunch is that Trump and Congressional Republicans could pretend their situation was manageable if Trump were in the mid-to-low 30s (hence the Cratering path), but if he dropped to 30% or lower they would be unable to govern. Losing 12-15% of previous support would mean about a third of his supporters had abandoned him. This is when Republicans start talking about their options: resignation, a primary challenge, or impeachment.

Some potential causes: a devastating Mueller report; a national disaster decidedly of Trump’s own making.

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Which path is most likely?  My hunch is that we will see some combination of treading water and normalization, where Trump’s dips are less frequent and his overall approval inches up a bit. The factors that would drive these two paths–numbing and having an opposition–will be strong in the coming year. Also, this seems to be the path he has already been on in 2018. His approval has basically stabilized between 40-42%. As I write this, Trump’s approval average is 41.8% which is about what it has been since mid-September. Unless a dip begins soon, he will have gone nine weeks without one, which would be a record stretch for him. I would not be surprised if his approval cratered, but that would require the public to change how they have been behaving toward Trump these past two years. As for the Mueller report, and how the public will react, only a fool would make a prediction. All I know for sure is that in six months the data will point to one of these five paths.