In Reply to: Economist has a good visualization of Trump posted by confused442 on September 05, 2025 at 13:46:39
From G. Elliot Morris:
Usually, presidential approval is reported as a binary — you either approve or disapprove of the job the president is doing. But many pollsters (including for our Strength In Numbers/Verasight partnership) ask voters to also indicate how strongly they feel about the president.
These 4-way approval breakdowns can help assess electoral outcomes and political backlash. That’s because intensity matters; someone who strongly approves (or disapproves) of a president is more likely to vote for (or against) them/their party in the next election. So it matters, for example, if the ~90% of people who support the president are die-hard MAGA voters, or if just 20% are.
The author of the post says the percentage of people who "somewhat" approve of Trump's presidency, divided by the percentage who "strongly" or "somewhat" approve of it, is significantly higher than before. Let's compare Trump's polls today to those at the beginning of his term and find out if that's true.
The proportion of all Trump approvers who only "somewhat" approve of the way he's handling his job as president (41%) is indeed higher than in January (30%), but it's not an earth-shattering difference. For further comparison, in his first week in office in 2017, 38% of people who approved of Trump's presidency were soft approvers.
What's more eye-catching to me is the growing percentage of people who say they strongly disapprove of the president, especially relative to the strong approval percentage. In January of this year, there was just a two percentage point gap between Trump's strong opposers and supporters. Today, that gap is 22 points — and the largest ever for this point in a presidential term.