Trump has a coronavirus polling bounce. How meaningful is it?
Polling experts say even a small upward movement for President Trump's poll numbers is meaningful, but they add significant caveats.
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WASHINGTON — Amid the gravest challenge of his presidency, public opinion polls have delivered some good political news for President Donald Trump: a small uptick in his approval rating, in some cases to the highest levels of his tenure.
The bump, around 2 to 5 percentage points depending on the poll, has cheered Trump supporters who argue that it shows the public responding to his leadership, and confounded critics who see an erratic president veering between strategies after weeks downplaying the threat.
Polling experts say even a small upward movement for Trump is meaningful, but they add caveats: His bump is smaller than presidents typically get during national crises; it lags that of other political leaders and it’s still early to measure the views of his performance amid an unpredictable, sweeping crisis likely to play out for months.
A small shift — but meaningful for Trump
Trump’s polling has been remarkably stubborn throughout his presidency, stuck within a narrow range and suggesting that attitudes about the president are fairly fixed, seemingly no matter what is happening in the world. That’s why even relatively small recent movements in numerous polls have caught attention.
“For there to be any change I think is notable, and I think this is a significant positive change,” said Carroll Doherty, the director of political research at the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. His poll, concluded March 24, showed a 5 percentage point increase in approval for Trump since January — up to 45% (though more people still saw Trump’s work negatively than positively).
“While it’s not large ... it is statistically significant and it brings him right back to where he was in March 2017, in the early months of his presidency,” Doherty said.
Gallup also showed a 5 percentage point uptick, to 49% approval, matching the best of his presidency. And a Washington Post/ABC poll concluded March 25 found Trump with a 48% approval against 46% disapproval, the first time that survey found a net positive approval.
Murray’s latest poll, concluded March 22, found a 2 percentage point increase in Trump’s approval.
National crises frequently produce a “rally around the flag” effect in which voters give more favorable marks to national leaders — though Gallup noted that has faded as politics have become more polarized. Barack Obama saw just a 7 percentage point bump, for example, after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden.
While Trump has seen a modest increase in job approval, others have soared. Gov. Andrew Cuomo saw his favorability in New York leap by 27 percentage points, to 71%, according to the Siena College Research Institute.
Other leaders such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson have also seen much bigger gains than Trump, according to the polling outfit Morning Consult.
“Compared to other crisis approval bumps for others leaders in the current period and in the past, it’s quite small” for Trump, said Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster who is working with Priorities USA, a super PAC airing ads attacking Trump for downplaying the coronavirus.
Democratic approval of Trump rises a bit
Typically, the rally behind a crisis president comes from voters in the opposing party, who express a surge of support for a leader they usually disagree with. Democrats, for example, gave a huge boost to Bush’s approval after 9/11. New York Republicans now see Cuomo, a Democrat, overwhelmingly favorably.
Trump’s gains are largely coming from a small share of Democrats who now see him in a better light. In Monmouth’s poll, Trump’s approval among Democrats grew from 6% to 11%. That’s a small percentage of one slice of the electorate showing a shift, “microscopic in polling terms,” wrote Murray, of Monmouth.
What’s it mean for 2020? Wait and see.
What all five experts interviewed agreed on was that polls at this moment might not indicate much for the president’s reelection chances.
A polling rise is obviously better than a potential collapse given the human and economic catastrophe now unfolding. But polls don’t predict what comes next, and the coronavirus outbreak is an unusually volatile situation whose real-life consequences are only starting to be felt.
“You can see how attitudes are changing very rapidly,” said Carroll, of Pew. "This is a situation that seems to be changing by the hour if not the day, so who knows how attitudes will be a month from now, a week from now, much less at election time.”