In the 2-3 weeks when the COVID-19 crisis became a reality for most Americans, President Trump saw a significant shift upward in his approval rating. He is currently at 45.8% approval in the fivethirtyeight.com aggregate of all approval polls. This is the highest he has ever been in his presidency, with the previous record of 44.8% in the second week after his Inauguration. On March 13, 2020 he declared a national emergency, and by March 21 he had hit 45.8% approval. He’s currently enjoying a bump of 3.5% points. (Note: I’m writing this in the first week of April, and things will undoubtedly change by the day.)
Trump has now had nine approval ratings bumps in his presidency. I define a bump with the following two criteria:
- an increase of 2% points or more
- the increase is sustained over a distinct period of time without significant interruption
The bumps range from 2% to 3.7% points (average 2.8%), and from 2 to 10 weeks (average 4.3 weeks). See the specs in the table below:
Trump’s Approval Bumps: A Short History
The first bump was Trump’s largest–3.7%–in January 2017 and was the results of the traditional inauguration honeymoon period. It ended as soon as it began, sliding into his first approval dip in Week 3, due in part to the Flynn firing and the travel ban fiasco.
He would not see another bump until the end of summer, but it was not due to anything positive he or his administration did. For two weeks at the end of August 2017 Trump was badly damaged by the fallout over the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and his “both sides” reaction to it. He reached the lowest approval of his term up to that point–36.9%–and so the four weeks that followed amounted to an approval bump because his approval ticked up to a still-low 39.4%. The same thing happened with his third bump starting in December 2017. A Flynn guilty plea and Trump endorsing the accused pedophile Roy Moore for Senate in Alabama, who then lost, brought Trump’s approval to what is still the lowest of his presidency–36.4%. By the end of January 2018 his approval floated back up to 39.5%, which meant a 3.10% bump.
The fourth bump occurred soon after, perhaps as a result of the end of Trump’s first government shutdown, which Trump and his media tried to bill as the “Schumer Shutdown.” Here is how a recent article described it: “Senate Democrats took a politically risky stand, shutting down the government to insist on protections for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. Gleeful Republicans saw the obstruction strategy as a huge blunder and pounded the Democrats, who caved after only a few days of sharp attacks and cut a deal to reopen.”
The fifth bump is harder to explain because the news cycles were not filled with positive news for him, and he was not particularly low–40.3%–by the standards of his own approval rating, as high as he’d been since the start of the term. Over four weeks from April to May 2018, he reached 42.4%. I attribute this bump to what I call Trump’s 42% homeostasis rule.
This is the period when Trump attained 42% and basically stayed there for the rest of his term (as of this writing in April 2020). Before Week 67 his average approval was about 40%; after that week it was about 42%. The psychic shock of Trump had worn off; we became used to him. We also learned, rightly or wrongly, that the normalcy that returns after an extreme Trump action, for example firing of the FBI director, means that worst case scenarios don’t always materialize and our fears are not always justified. In this way Trump became normalized. And in the new normal, about 42% of the country are willing to say they approve of his job performance. So this fifth approval bump, occurring from April 22 to May 19, 2018, when there was a lot of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels news, is when this normalization showed up in the approval rating.
The next two bumps are also a result of the 42% homeostasis rule. In the fall of 2018, during the build up to the Midterms, it took 10 weeks for Trump to climb from 39.9% to 42.9%. He had gotten that low due to a bad summer of news about Omarosa, Paul Manafort and snubbing John McCain’s funeral, among other mini scandals. He was also active on the stump in these weeks trying to paint the House democrats as friends to criminals and illegal immigrants, and some of his increase may have been generated by this contrast.
Similarly the seventh bump saw Trump rise from 39.3% to 43.7% in the winter of 2019. This bump corresponded with the end of the second and more protracted government shutdown.
It would be a full year before Trump enjoyed another approval bump. The eighth bump–41.8% to 43.8%–corresponded with the Senate Impeachment trial. While he took a significant approval hit in the weeks after his Ukraine scheme was first revealed in October 2019, the trial itself brought a series of oscillations, slight upticks and downticks. The Senate constituted a significant uptick probably due to the fact that Trump’s legal team could mount a public defense for the first time in the process.
The Coronavirus Bump
In the latter half of February 2020, Trump was solidly in the 43% range when the Coronavirus lockdowns began. Then after a two-week, 1% point dip, his ninth approval bump began, from 42.3% to 45.8%.
Here are some stats to put this bump in perspective:
Size: 2nd largest out of 9 (only the Inauguration bump was more)
Time Scale: 2nd quickest out of 9, jumping 2.6% in one week, and the full 3.5 over two (only the Inauguration bump was faster)
Start Point: 1st Best. All the previous bumps, including the inauguration, started from a lower baseline approval rating. This is relevant because it is harder to get a bump when your approval is higher, and easier when it is lower.
Duration: ??? We are in the third week of this bump. The average Trump approval bump sustains itself for about a month, with the exception of the Midterm bump that lasted three and a half months. As of this writing in the first week of April, the approval bump has stalled in its third week, sticking at 45.8% for two weeks in a row. Whether this rating will continue to increase or decline in the next few weeks will tell us more about the true shape of this ninth approval bump.
Read below for some other commentary on why the bump is happening now.
According to a report by Cook Political Report:
Democratic strategist tells me via email that while Trump’s “approval is up, particularly his approval on coronavirus response. BUT, the uptick is heavily driven by Democrats who (A) are not going to stay with him in the long haul; (B) likely driven by folks who WANT him to succeed, not people who actually think he is doing well.”
One GOP pollster I spoke with this week argues that we should think of this not as a ‘rally’ around Trump, but to see it as more about latitude. That is, voters who aren’t normally fans of the president (Democrats and many independents), are currently giving the president some ‘latitude’ to navigate this unprecedented crisis. However, there’s no evidence in the data, said this person, that they are turning into Trump voters.
And according to this Thomas Edsall piece, pols show danger signs for Trump:
A March 10-15 NBC News/Commonwealth Fund poll asked 1,006 adults “How much do you trust the President Trump to provide information about the coronavirus epidemic?” A majority, 53 percent, said they either had no trust at all (40 percent) or little trust (13 percent). 30 percent said they either completely trust (16 percent) or mostly trust (14 percent) the president.
“Trump’s overall approval rating drops among people who are more worried about catching the coronavirus, report severe local economic impacts, say their lives have been especially disrupted or know someone who’s caught the virus. He also has lower approval in states with higher per capita infection rates. … the results suggest that as the crisis deepens, the risks to views of his performance likely rise.”
This Vox piece points out that Trump’s bump is small compared to what world leaders and governors are earning right now, and in comparison with what presidents have historically earned during crises: “The most striking thing about Trump’s approval rating bump, however, is simply that it’s very small. Compared to other politicians in the US and abroad, he’s very bad at playing a unifying figure. As a politician, that weakness is offset by the way the Electoral College overweights his coalition. But given the public opinion equivalent of a layup, he’s falling far short of the hoop.”
Update: April 25, 2020 – The Cornavirus rally lasted only three weeks, beginning roughly March 15 and lasting until about April 4. The approval rating rose for two of those weeks, and then stayed stuck at the high point of 45.8% for the third week, before dropping. It is his third briefest bump, with six of the nine lasting more than four weeks.