Polls Meaningless?

Has Trump Made Approval Polls Meaningless?

He is the most disliked president ever at this point in his term. And he’s more consequential than presidents who were twice as popular.

By JEFF GREENFIELD

It’s been just another 24 hours or so in the alternate political universe where we dwell. The president of the United States has retweeted incendiary—and some inauthentic—videos of supposed Muslim depredations that brought angry words from America’s oldest ally, and even from INFOWARS—home of Alex Jones’ conspiracy theories. His press secretary says it really doesn’t matter whether the videos are true or false. In another tweet, Trump implied that Joe Scarborough may have killed someone in his office—a death investigators have unequivocally ruled a tragic accident stemming from a heart condition—and hints at something sinister about a top NBC News executive. We are told by the New York Times that the president now says the voice on that infamous “Access Hollywood” tape—for which he publicly apologized in October 2016, and for which Billy Bush was fired—may not be his at all, and he has been reanimating the baseless, racist smear that Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States.

And none of this will affect the fact that this looks like a week of major victories for the president and his agenda.

The stock market keeps breaking records, and the latest gross domestic product data show that the real economy is roaring, too. The tax cut bill—despite being about as popular as North Korea—moved significantly closer to Senate passage on Wednesday, as Republican senators on the fence swallowed their doubts and voted to move it to the floor for a Thursday vote. This same tax bill will do much to gut the same Affordable Care Act that was “saved” a few months ago by three defecting Republicans. Another Trump nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals was confirmed by the Senate, meaning that Trump will have placed nine of his nominees on federal appeals courts, three time as many as Obama had placed at this point in his presidency. A federal district court has allowed Trump to place his budget director as temporary head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the same budget director, who as a congressman, called the agency “a sad, sick joke.” Across the executive branch, industry lobbyists have been placed in charge of everything from drug pricing to environmental policy, while some of the sharpest critics of decades’ worth of trade and immigration policies are now in charge. And in Alabama, Trump’s preferred choice for the Senate, former Judge Roy Moore, has opened up a significant lead over Doug Jones in the days after highly credible accounts of sexual misconduct with teenage girls.

All of this—and much, much more—is happening under a president who, month after month, earns the lowest job-approval ratings of any first-year president, and whose policies—from taxes to health care to immigration to the environment—are rejected by thumping majorities of Americans.

How is this possible? How could a historically unpopular president be in a position to preside over more consequential changes, at least at this stage in their terms, than presidents like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama who were elected with clear electoral mandates? The same way he won the White House in the first place: by capitalizing on a unique political mix of geography, a last-minute intervention and the right opponent. He is where he is because roughly 80,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—about 1/30th of 1 percent of total votes cast—gave him his Electoral College margin. And what did it take to put Trump in that close a position in the first place? A Democratic opponent almost as unpopular as he was, whose campaign was fatally paralyzed by complacency in the face of pervasive attacks by a hostile foreign power.

Once in office, a different but still utterly unique mix of factors has enabled Trump to break the laws of political gravity, including the long-standing axiom that a deeply unpopular president cannot see his agenda succeed.

The president has been able to freeze his standing among Americans. If you look at where the polls have been over the past six months or so, the trend line looks like the brain activity of a patient who has flat-lined. His approval ratings have stayed within a 2-point range from May until now. The stories about Trump reaching “a new low” or “rebounding” look more like rounding errors than any meaningful movement, or the usual variation between different pollsters. For roughly 4 in 10 Americans, nothing Trump has said or done—not the insults, the White House chaos, the failure (so far) to achieve any of his biggest legislative goals, has mattered in the least. And if past is prologue, there is no reason to think his latest effusions, conspiracy theories and head-snapping denials of the patently obvious, will make any difference. At this rate, would anyone be surprised if the president actually tested one of his most famous theories about his popularity by wandering onto Fifth Avenue with a Smith & Wesson and shooting somebody?

The logic that persuaded many Republicans to stay with him last year even after the “Access Hollywood” tape—electing Trump was the only way to achieve long-standing conservative goals—has been vindicated. The evangelicals and social conservatives who saw the federal bench as the reason to stay with Trump are now seeing their fondest wishes for a sharply more conservative federal judiciary come to life, as well as a Justice Department now aligned firmly with them on matters ranging from abortion to gay and transgender rights. And while the Senate is filled with Republicans who refused to endorse Trump last year, even in the general election—roughly 1 in 5—they essentially embrace the positions he has taken across a range of matters. The confirmation votes for his judicial appointees among Republicans have been almost unanimous. The deep and abiding conservative faith in tax cuts as an economic cure-all means that even senators who have sharply broken with Trump over his temperament and character are ideologically inclined to vote with him and their party. (Only three GOP senators out of 52 voted “no” on Obamacare repeal, and unless that many vote “no” on the tax bill, it will pass the Senate.)

This support for Trump’s agenda, combined with his still-strong position within the Republican base, has effectively neutered any meaningful GOP resistance to the president’s wretched excesses. With the exception of a few retiring or cancer-striken senators, his ravings are described as “troubling” or “unhelpful.” House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said he couldn’t support Trump after the “Access Hollywood” tape came out, now won’t dare say a nasty word about him. Even if Republican leaders can discount the exaggerated clout of Steve Bannon, Trump’s numbers among the party rank and file, combined with the astonishing unpopularity of, say, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (one-third of Kentucky voters approve of his performance), make the idea of breaking with the president, or demanding that he rein in his pathologically dangerous rantings, unlikely.

Of course, a Democratic wave in the midterms would prove that the laws of political gravity still do apply. New polling numbers among millennials, for instance, show the GOP slightly ahead of ISIS, and if the recent results in Virginia are any portent, Democratic voters may well turn out in unusually high numbers next year. But even if that happens, the president and his party have more than a year to continue reshaping laws and regulations in dramatic fashion. And even if the House of Representatives flips, the GOP is almost certain to retain the Senate, meaning it would continue to hold the whip hand on all confirmations, from the courts to agencies like the EPA, FCC and FTC. So, while what remains of Trump’s legislative agenda would die with a Democratic House, the president wouldn’t become a complete lame duck.

The terrain I’ve described is not immutable. It is possible that at some point, the president’s behavior will reach so blatantly dangerous a level that his party’s elders will seek to fashion some way to entice or drag him back from the ledge. But if you look at what the president has done on a near-daily basis over the past nine months, and watch those flat-lined approval numbers and the feckless Republican response to his behavior, you may have to ask yourself: What could that behavior be? At this point, should the president in fact wander onto Fifth Avenue with a Smith & Wesson, his party will offer up heartfelt tributes to the Second Amendment.