Shutdown Leaves Base Cracked

DAVID A. GRAHAM
6:00 AM ET

... Early in January, public opinion briefly moved toward Trump, but since then it has gotten ugly for him again. A Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday showed that voters blamed Trump and Republicans more than congressional Democrats, 54–35. In a CBS poll, seven in 10 voters said a border wall was not worth the shutdown, and respondents rated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s handling of negotiations higher than Trump’s, 47–35. An Associated Press/NORC poll found that 60 percent held Trump responsible for the shutdown, versus 31 percent who blamed Democrats.

For months, Trump’s overall approval rating has been an object of fascination for pundits. On the one hand, it’s terrible, hovering in the low 40s ... On the other hand, it has just hovered there. Almost nothing — not the steady drumbeat of damning news on the Russia investigation, not the chaos of the White House, and neither a strong economy nor a volatile stock market — seemed able to dislodge it. The American people had apparently made up their minds about Trump, and the four in 10 who approved weren’t going to change their minds, come hell or high water.

Yet the shutdown seems to have broken that equilibrium. Trump hit his highest disapproval on record in the Morning Consult poll, at 57 percent. CBS found 59 percent disapproval. In the AP-NORC poll, Trump’s approval tanked from 42 percent a month ago to 34 percent ... FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator shows a clear downward trend since the start of the shutdown, with Trump’s approval heading toward depths not seen since his disastrous December 2017 and the aftermath of a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville ...

What’s interesting is not just that the approval rate is finally budging, but why — and with whom ...

In practice, however, weakened standing among that base accounts for Trump’s slumping approval. The NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll finds that Trump’s approval is down among suburban men, white evangelicals, and men without a college degree, all key segments of his constituency ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-approval-polls-shutdown/581215/