Trump’s Approval Ratings Are Bad News for Democrats

Published September 24, 2019

Something big happened to President Trump this week, and it’s not the Ukraine scandal. His job approval ratings have returned to where they were before his big August slump — and that’s bad news for the Democrats.

Trump clearly had a terrible late summer. Starting with his tweet that the four progressive Democratic House members who call themselves “the Squad” should “go back” to the countries they purportedly were from (only one of the four, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, is an immigrant), Trump’s job approval ratings declined significantly. From a pre-tweet high of 45.1 percent in the RealClearPolitics average on July 8, Trump’s ratings dropped more than two points before bottoming out at 42.7 percent earlier this month. That’s a terrible rating for a president barely more than a year out from reelection.

But now that Congress has returned and he’s no longer engaged in a battle with Democratic women of color, his ratings are up. They sit at 45.3 percent as of Tuesday afternoon, thanks to a recent Emerson Poll putting Trump’s approval rating at 48 percent, a 2½-year high for Trump. He’s still lower than a president should be if he wants to be reelected, but he’s on the way back.

Click here to read the rest of this piece at the Washington Post’s website.

Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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