Trump Gets a Poll Approval Bump Before State of the Union

On the day of President’s Trump’s State of the Union address, he got a bump in one of the best-known polls in politics.

The daily Presidential Tracking Poll commissioned by Rasmussen Reports shows that 48 percent of “likely U.S. voters” approve of the President’s job performance. Fifty-one percent disapprove.

According to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, this number is slightly up from his previous rank.

“I think the president’s primary focus isn’t on results in the polls, of which I think there are a number of them he’s doing very well,” Sanders said on CNN Tuesday. “Rasmussen had him at 45% just earlier this week.”

President Trump has been lambasted by the left and mainstream media for the government shutdown, his insistence on border-wall funding, his plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, and virtually everything else on his agenda. While he’s had good and bad poll numbers throughout his time in the White House, getting a slight approval uptick on the same day he delivers his State of the Union address is interesting.

It’s also no secret that Trump pays close attention to polls, tweeting about them frequently.

Rasmussen explains their methodology: “Some readers wonder how we come up with our job approval ratings for the president since they often don’t show as dramatic a change as some other pollsters do. It depends on how you ask the question and whom you ask. To get a sense of longer-term job approval trends for the president, Rasmussen Reports compiles our tracking data on a full month-by-month basis.”

“Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis,” Rasmussen notes. “To reach those who have abandoned traditional landline telephones, Rasmussen Reports uses an online survey tool to interview randomly selected participants from a demographically diverse panel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters is +/- 2.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.”

Now, what will President Trump’s poll numbers look like after the State of the Union?

is a professional writer and editor with over 15 years of experience in conservative media and Republican politics. He... More about John Hanson

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