How is Trump doing in the polls? Over the last week and a half, averaging polls done by CBS, NBC, The Economist, Reuters/Ipsos and Quinnipiac, he is doing terribly: an average approval rating of 41.6% and a disapproval rating of 55.4%. He is down 14 points.
As significant, however, are the results from the Quinnipiac poll as far as strength of support for Trump. Those polled were asked if they strongly approved, or strongly disapproved. Here the margin widened by a lot: only 28% approve of Trump, compared to 49% disapproving.
I was struck by these numbers when first hearing about them last week. I remembered back to the lowest point for Richard Nixon as the Watergate criminal conspiracy unraveled and Congress was moving toward impeachment. This led to Nixon’s ultimate resignation in August, 1974, 21 months after he had won re-election in a landslide, garnering 61% of the vote and winning 49 states.
What were Nixon’s approval numbers in July of 1974? 25%, just three points less than Trump’s “strong approval” numbers.
This is a big deal.
The Quinnipiac polling on issues was similar. By a 60 to 32 percent margin, those polled opposed US military aid to Israel. By a 55-37% margin, people disapproved of Trump’s handling of the job of President. By a large 62-37% margin, people disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy. But the largest margin was on handling the Epstein files: 19% in support to 67% disapproving.
I was surprised by these margins when I learned about all of this last week, but it fits with my sense of what is going on in the country and my experiences interacting with other people, which I’ve just done a lot of. For eight weeks between mid-July and yesterday, I was either at a week of family reunions in Virginia, traveling in my 2018 Chevrolet Bolt electric car out to Montana to visit my son, daughter-in-law and 4 year old grandson, spending five weeks with them, or returning home to New Jersey over 2,300 miles in our car.
One of the reasons my wife and I decided to travel this way was to experience very directly areas of the country we had never been to or not been to for a long time. We hoped all would go well mechanically, as well as our interactions with people along the way as we stopped to charge the car, camp or stay overnight in motels, eat in restaurants, get food and drink during rest stops and then, in southwest Montana, interact with others for the five weeks we were there.
I returned with a lot more hope about this country than I had before this trip. In the 12 states we went through or spent time in, most of them “red” or “purple,” we saw and heard very few signs of much support for Trump and his authoritarian government. I would estimate that, in all those eight weeks and thousands of miles, we saw no more than a dozen Trump signs and even fewer Trump hats or t-shirts being worn. People overwhelmingly were polite to us, as we were to them. There was virtually no evidence from these very many brief encounters that the USA at the grassroots has become a nasty, brutish, mean place.
I am sure that if we had gotten into ideological/political discussions with the people we interacted with, most of them of European descent, that there would have been some disagreements and tensions, but my sense is if that, even when that were true, there would have been some points of agreement to be found.
Trump and his regime are in big trouble, and they know it. Our resistance movement is winning victories and putting up a strong fight on local, state and national levels. The US American people as a whole are clearly open to and supportive of our message. Let’s keep building and growing that movement, incorporating more and more people into it who have never been activists before. That is a central, continuing task if we are serious about truly revolutionary change, in the very best sense.