The New Age

David Brooks made an interesting observation in his column:  "We’ve seen gigantic events like impeachment, the Kavanaugh hearings, the Mueller investigation and the 'Access Hollywood' tapes They come and go and barely leave a trace on the polls, the political landscape or evaluations of Donald Trump."  According to the records kept by the Roper Center, Trump's lowest approval rating has been 32% and his highest has been 49%, and those are individual polls which are subject to sampling error--the averages of polls taken at about the same time have only ranged from about 35% to 45%.  That's a lot less variation than any of his predecessors (starting with Roosevelt).   But if you look more closely, it seems that the decline in volatility began with Obama.  He started with very high approval ratings, around 70%.  Those declined pretty steadily and by Fall 2009 he was at a little over 50%.  After that, they only ranged from the low 40s to the low 50s--about the same range of variation as Trump, at a higher level of approval.  All presidents from Roosevelt through GW Bush had more substantial ups and downs during their whole time in office. 

So what changed with Obama?   In a previous post, I suggested that the Republican strategy of complete opposition meant that he couldn't have any real political successes--even when he got his way, as with the Affordable Care Act, it looked ugly.  In contrast, all previous presidents had some achievements that got bipartisan support.  Trump has been like Obama in this respect--Democrats have been united in opposition and he hasn't made much effort to get anyone to break ranks. 

This reminded me of a piece by John Sides in the Washington Post a few days ago.   He had a figure showing that from Kennedy to GW Bush, presidential approval was related to "consumer sentiment" (ratings of economic conditions)--with Obama and Bush, the connection has disappeared. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]