Why is presidential approval important

One complaint about the job approval rating is that it is too simplistic. As we see from discussion of the new Business Roundtable statement, any leader has a number of purposes in their role, and, consequently, a number of different ways in which their performance can be measured. For the president, in theory, performance can be measured by ratings given to him by other elected leaders, members of his party, international leaders, business leaders and so forth.

The president's performance can also be evaluated by non-attitudinal measures, most notably economic statistics such as GDP, unemployment, creation of new jobs, and inflation, as well as the nation's involvement in wars, international peace, measures of the population's wellbeing and health, relative prosperity across diverse groups, environmental health, and others.

I suppose one could create a scorecard of the five most important purposes of the president, similar to the Roundtable's recent efforts, and attempt to quantify his performance in each of these domains. But in reality, thousands of aspects of American life are affected by a president's actions, and thousands of identifiable groups of people he affects have opinions about his performance -- making it very difficult to develop such a composite scorecard.

When we use the job approval rating as a measure of a president's performance, we deputize the people of the United States as our data summarizers , asking them to take into account all aspects of the president's performance and to summarize it with one response.

Americans are serving as journalists, juries and judges, and the job approval rating -- like a jury's verdict -- puts it together in one place. I've been involved in with Gallup's job approval rating for about 30 years and I've seen a number of differing approaches to presidents' public reactions to the measure. Most presidents, in my experience, are loath to admit publicly that they use polls as a gauge of their performance in office, most likely because they hold on to the heroic view that they are courageously doing what is right for the country, even if the people of the country don't know what is right for themselves.

This approach is exemplified by George W. Bush, who said : "I really don't care what polls and focus groups say. What I care about is doing what I think is right. Of course, like all other presidents, Bush administration officials and advisers, the record shows, spent millions on polling , and no doubt Bush was aware of what that was showing.

Regardless of their public pronouncements, it's fair to say that, as was the fictional case for President Bartlet in Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing television series , all presidents in reality pay at least some attention to their job approval rating. The connection between public opinion and executive action by presidents is a one-way relationship: public opinion influences the issuance of executive orders, but executive actions do not have a significant impact on public opinion.

Christenson and Kriner note that the Trump presidency so far has been an outlier to this model. The results of the elections might offer insights into whether this strategy was effective for the current President. Victor Asal, University of Albany. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. Not so fast. On the one hand, we do need to recalibrate our expectations of presidential approval ratings. Almost certainly even moreso with Republicans—but unpopular all the same. Which is perfectly interesting in a polling geek or political science sort of way.

But the answer to the opening question remains self-evident. He still remains in net positive territory on his handling of the pandemic, and still has a positive net approval rating. The rules for a recall in California mean that a small group of highly passionate voters can trigger one.

Back when it was applied to Reagan, what it signified was not just a certain immunity to scandal or controversy, but massive popularity in its own right, enabling him to win two big landslides, and to end office with high approval ratings even after Iran-Contra. Even then, the effect was somewhat overstated. Early on, it was pretty low, which contributed to a poor first midterm. The Hinckley attack led to a temporary spike in his popularity, but the economic recession eventually caused it to collapse, which is where it stayed for the next couple of years.

It increased in time for reelection amid a strong economic recovery, but in his second term it took a hit following Iran-Contra, even though it recovered later on. Does that mean that if Trump's approval rating continues to languish below 50 percent he will definitely lose re-election in ?

Absolutely not. If there's one thing that Trump has proven in both his candidacy and tumultuous time in office is that precedent means nothing to this president. Just look at this one startling fact: Trump was elected in despite being the least-liked major party presidential candidate of all time. His unfavorability rating on election day was a whopping 61 percent. It helped that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had the second highest unfavorability rating in history at 51 percent.

You might notice that not every job-approval poll comes up with the same numbers. That's because each polling organization uses a slightly different methodology. Some pollsters, like Gallup and Quinnipiac, call up a representative sample of Americans over 18 and simply ask them if they approve or disapprove of the president's job performance.

In Trump's case, those polls result in lower approval and higher disapproval numbers. But what about Rasmussen Reports, Trump's favorite pollster?

In that case, Rasmussen doesn't simply poll American adults or even American registered voters, a tighter demographic. Rasmussen only counts answers from " likely voters ," people who say they are likely to vote in the next election. Rasmussen is also the only company polling people on a daily basis. On top of that, Rasmussen Reports give respondents four options: "strongly approve," "somewhat approve," "somewhat disapprove," and "strongly disapprove.

However, that doesn't always seem to be the case. The June 9, , Rasmussen poll found that only 44 percent of likely U. The findings of the latest Gallup poll however, which was released June 10, , showed Trump's approval rating had fallen to 39 percent.

The polling was conducted from May June 4, , as protests occurred throughout the country after the May 25 death of George Floyd in police custody. It's the first time his approval rating has been below 40 percent since October Of course, the election is not the election.

The biggest difference, perhaps, is Trump is an incumbent president running on his own record. And so far has not been kind.