U.S. President Donald Trump’s approval rating has ticked slightly lower in recent days as more Americans worried about the direction of the U.S. economy as the new leader threatens a host of countries with tariffs, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
The six-day poll, which closed on Tuesday, showed 44% of respondents approved of the job Trump is doing as president, down from 45% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted January 24-26. Trump’s approval rating stood at 47% in a January 20-21 poll conducted in the hours after the Republican’s return to the White House.
The share of Americans who disapprove of his presidency has risen more substantially, to 51% in the latest poll, compared with 41% right after he took office.
Fuck off with these consent-manufacturing poll-fraudsters trying to attribute the decline to “the economy” and not “turning the US into a goddamned dictatorship.”
On the one hand yes, I agree that’s the worst part, on the other hand polling is an actual data science. Legit polling organizations don’t just pull shit out of nowhere. If they say “due to the economy” they mean there is a correlation between people with a negative attitude towards Trump and people who say their biggest concern is the economy. And this makes sense because let’s be honest, most Democrats already dislike him for other reasons, so the people who are just NOW changing their opinion on him are likely to be for money reasons since that’s the current thing going on.
I did some digging to try to figure out the poll methodology, because I was planning to claim something to the effect of “but if the poll doesn’t have a category for democratic backsliding, then it will be skewed to attribute the opinions to other causes instead.”
That’s what I would have written, except I found the actual poll results and it turns out it does have such a category. That’s the good news for Reuters’ credibility re: their headline.
The bad news is that “economy, unemployment and jobs” only barely edges out “political extremism or threats to democracy” among all Americans by a single measly percentage point (i.e. within the poll margin of error – a statistical tie), and even then only because Republicans unsurprisingly don’t care about the latter. Meanwhile, political extremism is the bigger factor among both Democrats and independents (i.e. everybody else).
By implying that the entire reason for the approval rating change is the economy and failing to mention political extremism at all, this Reuters article is blatant spin and erasure of that factor. The Reuters/Ipsos polling people might be “legit,” but the reporting of it is absolutely normalizing and manufacturing consent for Trump’s nascent dictatorship.
Without knowing more about their usual procedures regarding what they state is the “biggest” issue reported by those they’ve polled and whether they are writing the article how they normally would I cannot agree whether they are intentionally trying to normalize anything, so we’ll have to agree to disagree.