Why Trump's Approval Rating Doesn't Matter

More than three months after Election Day, lots of Americans are still trying to grapple with the odd result that our vaunted democratic system spat out: The guy running the country is disliked by most of the people in it.

The most recent marker of America's unhappiness with Donald Trump is a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday showing that just 38 percent of voters approve of the job he's doing. A majority of respondents thought Trump was dishonest, not level-headed, and a bad leader who doesn't care about average Americans or share their values. Though more people approve than disapprove of his handling of the economy, most voters in the poll were opposed to his high-profile executive action suspending refugee admissions to the US. (Though most respondents also thought of Trump as being "strong" and "intelligent," so life's a rich tapestry I guess.)

That poll follows a trend (stretching back to before the inauguration) of Americans not liking Trump. He was the least popular incoming president since people started caring about polls, and his following through on his anti-immigrant, anti-regulation rhetoric hasn't made him any more beloved. Combine that with the mass protests springing up in American cities, and you're left with an impression that opposition to Trump is both deep and wide.

Trump is understandably cheesed at all this. He's called these polls "rigged," insisted that "any negative polls are fake news," and also highlighted one poll that found a majority of Americans approved his controversial travel ban. But though low approval ratings annoy the president and warm the cockles of left-leaning Americans, they don't mean much at this point. Why is that true? Let us count the ways:

King poll nerd Nate Silver wrote a whole thing this week about the varying approval numbers polls came up with depending on whether they surveyed all adults or registered voters or likely voters, and whether the polls were conducted online or through automated scripts or by live interviews. Basically, there are a lot of numbers floating around out there—some often right-leaning pollsters put Trump's approval rating at 55 percent, while Pew and Gallup have him hovering around 40 percent. If the truth is somewhere in the middle, that's a pretty big middle.

If these numbers indicated that Trump voters were changing their minds about him, that would be major news—but that's not happening. Only 10 percent of Republican voters surveyed by Quinnipiac disapproved of Trump, while 83 percent approved of him. This is backed up by other data showing how polarized America is right now, which goes beyond people's opinion of Trump. After Trump's victory, the number of Republicans who viewed the economy as being excellent or good suddenly jumped, according to Pew. The perception of the media also breaks on partisan lines, with Democrats trusting the press more than Trump and Republicans trusting the president more. It's possible to explain Trump's unpopularity as a byproduct of few Democrats being willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

It's true that Trump hasn't enjoyed the positive approval numbers that most newly minted presidents enjoy. But he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, a record negative margin for an election winner—he could hardly have expected a honeymoon period. And presidents throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have often had sub-40 approval ratings, including Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in their first terms. Historically, those low numbers have come at times when the overall US economy is doing much worse than it is now, but presumably there are things Trump could do that would push his approval rating up between now and any election. Which brings us to:

This is obvious, but: Trump isn't up for reelection until 2020, and even the 2018 midterms are a long way off. Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight took a very early look at the relationship between presidential approval ratings and midterm results. Dive in if you want—but the overall takeaway is that local conditions (like what sort of candidates the opposition party fields and how aggressively gerrymandered House districts are) will matter a lot. So will voter turnout and which demographics of voters turn out. It's complicated! Let's move on.

Here's the big one: It's not like millions of people woke up in January and just realized that, actually, they didn't really care for Trump's personal brand of laziness, bluster, cable news ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism. Though many pre-election polls were wrong, the RealClearPolitics poll tracker showed Trump's approval rating had been underwater throughout the campaign, a result that's consistent with everything we've seen since Election Day. Trump won anyway, at least partly because Hillary Clinton's numbers were even worse. Both candidates were intensely disliked, and it's possible that Clinton would have a low approval rating were she in office—Republicans likely wouldn't take to her more than Democrats have taken to Trump.

For Democrats to actually unseat Trump, or flip enough seats in Congress to take control of it, they'll need to do more than demonstrate Trump is bad; they'll need to convince voters that they can do better. Trump's unpopularity in that Quinnipiac poll was part of a broad dissatisfaction voters had with their elected officials—Republicans in Congress had a 31 percent approval ratings, and Democrats were at 32 percent.

Trump didn't win the White House because people liked him. He won because a lot of Americans hated what their government had come to represent and trusted Trump to at least disrupt things. Trump's opposition will have no problem in 2018 and beyond demonstrating that things are broken. The trick will be selling the fix.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.