Trump’s “High” Approval Rating Completely Disappears After First Month

Donald Trump got unusually high marks from a CBS/YouGov poll released a week ago, but the rest of the data now proves that this poll was an outlier. Trump’s “high” approval rating has completely evaporated according to all of the latest polls, as well as the polling aggregates, meaning that it took less than a month for Trump to drop from his most popular point ever, and he’s now hovering well below 50% approval rating – with disapproval now higher than approval. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Donald Trump came into office with the highest approval rating he has ever had, 49%. Yeah, that's not good. It's not even half, but he was still above water because more people approved of the job he was doing than disapproved of it. Then of course, last weekend, eight days ago, we got that report from CBS/YouGov, that showed us that Donald Trump's approval rating had shot up to 53%. Holy crap. After three weeks in office, more people liked what they saw from him? That seemed a little weird at the time, didn't it? Seemed like maybe that's an outlier? Well, it turns out that it was in fact an outlier, and the results of that CBS/YouGov poll have not even been close to being replicated in other polls, including other YouGov polls taken after that one was released. Donald Trump's very high approval rating has of course now evaporated, and his approval rating is in fact underwater. Here is what the new numbers that YouGov has are telling us.

The poll taken from February 9th through 11th, Trump had a 46% approval rating and a 48% disapproval rating. In a poll that they had taken from February 2nd to February 4th, so just seven days prior, he had a 46% approval rating and a 44% disapproval rating. Poll taken two weeks ago, he had a 49% approval rating and a 43% disapproval rating. So each poll, those numbers were getting closer until finally they flipped and Donald Trump is once again underwater with his approval ratings. And by the way, speaking of that initial CBS/YouGov poll from eight days ago, with a 53% approval rating, according to the polling aggregates, Donald Trump only still has a 49% approval rating. So again, that CBS/YouGov 53%, holy hell, how is this happening? The answer is it's not.

That poll was indeed an outlier and should not be factored into the equations because it was so wildly off. And by the way, that's not just according to me, that's according to the polling company that initially took the poll YouGov along with CBS. So their subsequent polls have not replicated that. Their previous polls did not show anything close to that. In fact, they kept showing a narrowing of the gap between approval and disapproval. So apparently CBS's involvement in that particular poll is what drove it higher than it should have been. The point is this, right, we know from the 2024 election polls are not reliable. Like, I'm done with presidential polling and all of that BS. It's total garbage these days.

But the approval rating polls, those don't necessarily tell us as much as the trends tell us, and that's the part of polling that we need to be paying attention to, right? It's the political scientist in me. That's my degree, that's my area of expertise. This is where I really get to get into the knowledge of how these things work. What we have to look at is the trends. And right now for Donald Trump, all of the trends are going in the wrong direction. His approval rating is going down, his disapproval is going up, and that's happening in poll, after poll, after poll. The reason for that, of course, is because people are paying attention. Even if they're not paying attention to politics, they're paying attention to the prices they're paying at the grocery store. That is the killer. That is what is coming for Donald Trump.

So again, 95, I think it is, percent of the public does not consume political news at all. They're not watching the daily, holy crap, what is happening now? I think more of them are than usual right now, and that plays a role. Sure. But what's really getting to Trump and his approval rating right now is that these people remembered, he said, day one, bring prices down. I'll do it. And prices are going up, unemployment is going up.