- More poll dancing - 17th April 2025
- Another baby monitor - 17th April 2025
- Running hot - 17th April 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and 41 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, polling numbers have always been central showing who is doing well, as well as who is doing badly, and now this is underlined with new figures revealing that despite what he says, Donald Trump’s popularity is plunging.
Numbers don’t lie.
Poll results show what the public think of a politician, and his or her policies.
They either get seized on gleefully if they are good for the politician, and are publicised in the media, or if they are bad they are COMPLETELY ignored.
If the politician is confronted with the awful polling figures by a trouble-making journalist like me, and it is near an election, then another tactic is to say: “The number of votes in the ballot box is the real test”.
But only the first method is likely to be used by Donald Trump when he scrutinises the latest numbers, because they are bad for him, and perhaps the current row over his use of tariffs is something to do with it.
He might even try to spin his way out of it by saying they are GOOD when in fact they are BAD, because you just don’t know with him.
Mr Trump’s approval rating has fallen by 14 points since he entered office, more steeply than the five-point drop he had suffered by this time in his first term, according to polling from YouGov/The Economist.
Americans give him a net rating of minus-seven percentage points on his handling of the economy, compared with positive ratings at this point in his first term.
Nearly one in five of Mr Trump’s own voters in 2024 say they disapprove of his handling of inflation and prices, while 12 per cent disapprove of him on jobs and the economy.
Likewise, in early April, data from the University of Michigan’s (UoM) survey of consumers showed Republicans less optimistic about the economy than at any point during Mr Trump’s first term, aside from December 2020, after he had just lost re-election.
Will sagging polls slow him down? His hubris and self-confidence suggest it won’t.
A self-described “Tariff Man”, Mr Trump has acted from conviction and acknowledged that his sweeping levies might cause “some pain” for Americans in the short run, before reviving manufacturing jobs in the long term.
Mr Trump will not have to face the voters again, though he has mused about running for a third term, despite a constitutional prohibition.
But his Republican colleagues face a reckoning in mid-term elections.
Having built their winning coalition on the backs of economically frustrated swing voters, Republican Congressional and state-level candidates will be particularly vulnerable if Mr Trump’s tariffs push inflation higher or cause a recession.
His re-election was secured by swing voters and infrequent ones, many of whom were disillusioned with the economy under Joe Biden.
These pocketbook voters are more diverse than the traditional Republican base (Mr Trump made impressive gains with young voters as well as Hispanic voters, for example) and are not dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.
According to the Cooperative Election Study (CES), an election survey, 84 per cent of the voters who backed Mr Trump in 2020 were white, 74 per cent identified as conservative and 72 per cent were over the age of 45.
However the new voters he attracted in 2024 were different: 65 per cent were white, a mere 42 per cent said they were conservative and just 41 per cent were older than 45.
Should Mr Trump fail to deliver the economic boom he promised on the campaign trail, these voters could easily turn against him, and Republican politicians or officials should be worried
So despite him saying everything is “beautiful” it isn’t really – Mr Trump only has to look at the latest polling figures…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when politicians were always put on the spot about bad polling figures) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
A HAPPY EASTER TO ALL OUR READERS – PASG HAPUS!
