The approval rating of President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address was exceptionally high, with 75 percent approving, and only 25 percent disapproving. Most importantly, the approval was 72 percent among independents, the most relevant demographic in predicting his re-election odds.
Following up those high approval ratings of the speech came a boost in the polls too – ten percentage points over the past month.
According to The Hill,
The poll, conducted by Monmouth University, finds that 42 percent approve of the job Trump is doing, against 50 percent who say they disapprove. The same poll from December found Trump’s job approval at 32 percent, against 56 percent who said they disapproved.
The 32 percent approval rating Trump logged in the December survey was the lowest for any major poll since Trump was elected. According to the RealClearPolitics average, Trump is at 40.4 percent approval and 56.3 percent disapproval.
As we’ve pointed out in the past however, most polls have tended to oversample Democrats.
One heavily publicized poll from ABC predicted that Hillary Clinton was ahead by an incredible 12 points in the polls. That sounded shocking, until you read the fine print and realized that they oversampled Democrats by nine percentage points relative to their share of the U.S. population. Perhaps their goal was to try to convince potential Trump voters that their vote wouldn’t count anyway, so they might as well stay home.
Clearly, that strategy didn’t work on the campaign trail, but it continues with his presidential approval rating. Just take a look at the samples of the polls listed below. Democrats are oversampled in every single one of them. The most egregious case of bias came from The Economist, in which 58 percent more Democrats than Republicans were polled.
Trump also saw a boost in support for individual policy initiatives in the Monmouth poll.
Most voters still believe their taxes will go up under the new plan — 36 percent say they believe their taxes will rise, 32 percent said they expect their taxes will stay the same and only 24 percent believe their taxes will go down. But that is a big improvement over December, when 50 percent believed their taxes would go up.
It’s a lie that they’ll pay more, of course, and the media is entirely to blame for the misconception.
Monmouth’s generic ballot survey for the House also has positive news for Republicans — Democrats only hold a 47 to 45 advantage. That’s a massive improvement over their December survey, which found that Democrats had a 15-point generic ballot lead, 51 to 36.
Share this great news with others now!
