With six and a half months to go till WH2020 Trump is still in negative approval territory
Unlike in the UK where for less importance is attached to leader ratings the approval numbers for an incumbent US president are generally seen as a good indicator of how the next election is going to shape out. YouGov, which is now very well established in the US, just put out its latest chart showing the trend since just after Trump became president in early 2017 till the present day. What can be seen is that he has had much…
In a State: Assessing WH2020
Why Trump approval ratings are a better pointer than state polls I do have some fairly strong views on the election. In particular, I would advise you to cast aside state polling on Biden vs Trump and look instead at Trump’s favourability on a state-by-state basis. Why? Because US pollsters use very strict turnout filters. Didn’t vote in Election 2016… well, they largely assume that you won’t vote in 2020. This matters, especially as President Trump didn’t win 2016, Hillary…
How Trump and his media acolytes got the coronavirus wrong
Might be problematical in election year The above compilation of clips, mostly from Fox News, shows how leading media supporters of the President and Trump himself were viewing the epidemic only a few weeks ago. Since then the US has become the nation most affected and Trump has changed his tune. His latest is blaming the World Health Organisation. The initial stance from the White House was reflected in the polling. In mid-March Ipsos found that 63% of Democrats and…
Trump’s inadequate response to Covid-19 will doom his presidency
All the options are bad and Trump is running scared of them In some ways the world is very fortunate. It may not feel like it at the moment, never mind in a few months or – if we’re lucky – weeks, but pandemics are an inevitable if rare occurrence of nature and the best we can do is ride out the storm with good judgement and timely action. There is probably no other country on Earth that was as…
Trump’s Republicans move drop below a 50% betting chance for WH2020
This looks as though it was driven Trump’s initial reaction to the coronavirus There’s little doubt that Donald Trump is not having a good coronavirus crisis. His initial dismissal of this this being not much more than a commons cold hardly said a lot for his judgement in the early days. He wasn’t helped by several of his right-wing backers declaring that that this had been got up by the Democrats to wound Trump ahead of November’s election. After a…
The coronavirus: Trump bans all travel to Europe for a month from tomorrow excluding the UK
In a televised statement from the Oval Office on the coronavirus crisis Trump has annouced that a ban on flights between the US and Europe from tomorrow. There is just one exception – the UK. According to the New York Times this was one of a number of “strong but necessary” actions designed to impede what he described as “horrible infection”. This was a “foreign virus” that had been “seeded” in the US because the EU had “failed to take…
Trump’s handling of the spread of coronavirus is costing him dear and making the situation in the US far worse
New Quinnipiac poll: By 56-40, Biden is seen as better than Trump in a crisis. Among independents, that's 59-33 (!) Among women, that's 63-32 (!!!) The poll is simply awful for Trump. Turns out he doesn't have magical chaos-spreading powers, after all:https://t.co/gM5vA5UTJq — Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) March 9, 2020 This is from a powerful piece by Brian Klaas in the Washington Post The rapidly worsening coronavirus outbreak is President Trump’s Chernobyl. By putting dangerous myths above objective facts, Trump has turned…