As expected…Donald Trump gets a Trial bounce heading to November…

With nine months to go until the Presidential election, Trump’s celebratory gesture was premature, to say the least. But anyone who wants to deny him a second term needs to be clear-eyed about the challenge ahead. Most Presidents who run for reëlection win. Given his incumbency and an economy that is still growing steadily, Trump has two key advantages on his side. Defeating him is going to take a mighty effort from the Democrats and their supporters—one that combines energy, cleverness, and discipline, rather than the disorganization and dysfunction displayed in Iowa.

Since the Second World War, only three sitting Presidents have run for reëlection and been defeated: Gerald Ford, in 1976; Jimmy Carter, in 1980; and George H. W. Bush, in 1992. Nine of the twelve incumbents who sought reëlection won. In two of the three races where incumbents were defeated, the economy was—or was perceived to be—in serious trouble. With policymakers at the Federal Reserve expecting G.D.P. growth to continue at a rate of around two per cent this year, what about this November? Ray Fair, an economist at Yale, built a statistical model that seeks to forecast elections on the basis of incumbency and G.D.P. growth. Over the years, the Fair model has had a mixed record, reflecting the fact that these factors aren’t the only ones which impact elections. But the model does provide a handy way of summarizing some key factors, and it is now predicting that Trump will win the popular vote comfortably. If that happened, he would win an even bigger victory in the electoral college.

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Throughout his Presidency, his job-approval rating has lagged far behind his approval rating on economic issues. That’s still true. In the aforementioned Gallup survey, sixty-three per cent of respondents said that they approved of Trump’s handling of the economy—fourteen points above his job-approval rating.

It should also be noted that the Gallup job-approval rating is an outlier. A new Reuters poll puts Trump’s rating at forty-two per cent, and an Economist/YouGov poll puts it at forty-four per cent. On Thursday afternoon, the Real Clear Politics poll average, which combines the findings from many individual surveys findings, had Trump at 45.2 per cent, with a disapproval rating of 51.8 per cent. Four months ago, his approval rating was 43.6 per cent, and his disapproval rating was 53.7 per cent. These numbers tell us that Trump is still unpopular, but that he has become a bit less so recently….

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