A year into his presidency, Donald Trump’s job approval rating has slumped to only half of the rating enjoyed by JFK.
A year after his election, Irish American icon JFK scored a 77% approval rating according to CNN, second only to George W Bush in the company’s history of polling. By contrast, a year on from the 2016 election and only 35% of Americans approve of Donald Trump’s performance as president - a 10% drop since he took office in January.
Very few of Trump’s detractors, the poll suggests, are from his own party: 85% of Republicans think he’s doing a good job as do 33% of independents and 4% of Democrats. All of which means 59% of Americans disapprove of his job performance, the majority of whom are Democrats.
Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all finished their first year as Commanders in Chief with approval ratings in the mid to high 50s. Reagan fared poorly with only 49% approving, George HW Bush scored 71% and his son, George W, hit 86%.
Unlike other presidents, Trump's approval rating hasn't dipped or dropped dramatically.
It's just bounced around the 40% mark since he took office. https://t.co/u6Bnc1yGRm pic.twitter.com/3La6RY3hnH
— Vox (@voxdotcom) December 22, 2017
And the findings are not unique to CNN - an organization that Trump has routinely denounced as “fake news."
Read More: JFK, Reagan, Clinton rated top modern presidents
Gallup found in December 1961 that Kennedy’s approval rating was 76% - higher than his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, who scored 68% in December 1953. However only 35% of respondents told Gallup they think Donald Trump is doing a good job - an unprecedented poor score so soon into a President’s first term.
However, not all pollsters have Trump so low: NBC News/Wall Street Journal released a poll last week in which 41% of people said they approved of the President’s performance in office and Rasmussen Reports had it as high as 43%.
Read More: Trump’s ratings plunge to new low as base deserts him
Trump himself has routinely disavowed polls as fake news: last month he tweeted that, “They [the polls] are wrong. Some people think numbers could be in the 50's. Together, WE will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
One of the most accurate polls last time around. But #FakeNews likes to say we’re in the 30’s. They are wrong. Some people think numbers could be in the 50's. Together, WE will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! pic.twitter.com/YhrwkdObhP
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2017
Of course it is all relative: JFK did not have to cope with the vagrancies of a 24 hour news cycle and George W Bush was seen to have responded well in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Ronald Reagan also performed poorly (in comparison to other Presidents) but cruised to one of the biggest landslides in US history in 1984. In light of how be confounded Trump confounded the polling profession in 2016, would anyone bet against him winning re-election in 2020?
Latest US Election Polls forecast: Hillary #Clinton has a 92% chance to win https://t.co/8963NkUchI https://t.co/79eJWmvkcT
— Diyyinah Jamora (@diyyinah) October 20, 2016
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