President Donald J. Trump celebrates the passage of the Tax Cuts Act with Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan | December 20, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
The three big running poll averages tracked by RCP are narrowing in favor of the GOP this week. Those include:
- President Trump’s Job Approval, which has been in the 7 – 7.5 Disapprove range for the last week or so. That’s the lowest it’s been since March of 2017. What that means is 7 percentage points more people disapprove of Trump’s job as president than approve. Still not great, but getting drastically better. His disapproval peaked out in December at around net 21 percentage points of people disapproving. So Trump has managed to impress 2/3rds of those net disapprovers since December.
- The 2018 Generic Congressional Vote, which is seeing some solidification of voter feelings. What that means is, voters are coming off the sidelines and choosing whether or not they would vote for the GOP or Democrats. More of those folks are coming off and settling on the GOP side in the last week than the Democrat side. Both sides are picking up support, but the GOP at a faster rate, narrowing the gap to 6.1 points favoring Democrats (not a bad number).
- Direction of the Country. This poll is probably the most interesting. Americans feel better about the direction of the country right now than they have since December of 2012. And that number was an anomaly. The last time there was such a high level of sustained “Right Direction” feeling about the country was back in Summer of 2009, the early Obama days when everyone thought he was going to make all the pain go away.
Given the trend of those polls, it’s no wonder Democrats are flinging the immigrant children story at the wall to see if it will stick. They need big, headline grabbing events to take away from the sustained economic gains that are pushing sentiment in favor of Trump and the GOP (though probably less so for the party).
It will be interesting to see what the Democrats try next, because Trump has mostly cut the issue short by signing an executive order banning family separations. It would be nice if the GOP could get some momentum going by pushing some legislation that people might actually support, but as Dick Young writes today, they have shown no signs of actually doing that.
