Looking at Trump’s numbers….Are they where they should be?

A critical look Donald Trump’s numbers in relation to other President at this time during their tenure after this much time….

There Are surprises that most Democrats do NOT know….

Trump’s numbers are very much in line with the last FOUR President’s…..

Yup!

As much as even I knock Trump’s numbers in the polls right now?

He IS doing about NORMAL among the modern day President’s …

But?

The other guys where fighting stronger political headwinds….

Shouldn’t Trump’s numbers actually be HIGHER?

On June 25, Axios’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei took readers inside Donald Trump’s “winning, cynical plan.” They argued that “the more President Trump does, says and tweets outrageous things, the more his critics go bananas and the better he does in the polls.”

The evidence for this was that Trump had hit 45 percent in Gallup’s presidential approval tracker — a personal high for him, though he’s since slipped back to 42 percent. More impressively, Trump’s approval among Republicans is hovering around 90 percent, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s disapproval among Republicans was up to 53 percent.

“It’s arguably the most cynical strategy imaginable,” write Allen and VandeHei. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be successful politically.”

I should say at the outset: I believe Allen and VandeHei have this one wrong. I don’t think Trump’s poll numbers show he’s found a successful political strategy — quite the opposite, in fact. But this is a difficult debate to have because it requires defining what success would look like for Trump, which means settling on some counterfactual sense of where Trump’s poll numbers could and should be.

Sure, 45 percent, or his current 42 percent, is higher than Trump’s April low of 38 percent, or his all-time Gallup low, last seen in December, of 35 percent. But his numbers have held within a very narrow range since his inauguration. Indeed, Trump’s approval has actually been the most stable of any president in polling history, as this chart from Charles Franklin shows:

Charles Franklin/Gallup data

The real question, then, is whether the narrow range Trump has settled into represents success or failure. And so we need to establish a baseline: Are Trump’s poll numbers high given what we might expect, or low?….

…

“Trump’s poll numbers are probably 20 points below where a president would typically be with consumer sentiment as high as it is now,” says John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University who has done work benchmarking presidential approval to economic indicators.

So here, then, is what we can say: Judged on the economy, which is the traditional driver of presidential approval, Donald Trump’s poll numbers should be much, much higher than they are now. Far from finding a winning strategy, he seems to have found a losing one despite holding a winning hand….

More….

image…Rick Kern/Getty Images for Ford Motor Company