National Polling Shows Reality Is Starting to Catch Up With Trump's Abysmal Coronavirus Response
April 13th 2020
President Trump Delivers Remarks During a Coronavirus Update Briefing (The White House)
By Kerry Eleveld
Americans are beginning to see the real consequences of Donald Trump's complete and utter ineptitude in handling the novel coronavirus outbreak, and national polling is starting to reflect that reality.
A new CNN poll found that 55% of Americans believe the federal government has done a poor job of containing the spread of the epidemic, an eight-point increase from a week ago. Another 55% say Trump could be doing more to fight the outbreak (while 43% say he’s doing everything possible). A strong plurality of 37% of respondents also said their fears about coronavirus have spiked in the last several days, far more than the 5% saying their fears had lessened in recent days.
The CNN poll also found that Trump's approvals and disapprovals for handling of the epidemic had risen since early March, with 45% now approving and 52% disapproving compared to 41% approval/48% disapproval a month ago.
But in terms of Trump's overall job approval rating, other polling appears to show that whatever bump he got initially from being a president in the midst of a crisis is now starting to fall away. While one poll showed his job approval rating spiking as high as 49%, the reality is that he never got more than a several-point bump in the FiveThirtyEight.com aggregate. Now you can see below that Trump's approvals appear to have topped out at about 45.8% approve (49.9% disapprove) and are just beginning to trend downward again.
attribution: FiveThirtyEight.com/Screenshot
The same is true in Civiqs polling, which isn't as prone to jumpy movement as most polling, but you can see Trump gained a point, hitting 44% approval in late March, and is now ticking downward again at 43%.
While there are likely multiple factors affecting Americans' perceptions of Trump's overall job approvals, one major one is that more people are starting to be affected personally by COVID-19. The CNN poll found that about 1 in 5 Americans (22%) now say they know someone personally who's been diagnosed with the virus. As CNN notes, that's double the share of Americans who said the same in a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted just two weeks ago.
Unfortunately, that same number is also likely to rise significantly over the next couple weeks. People seem to understand that, with 80% telling CNN the worst is yet to come with the virus.
Posted with permission