Donald Trump unwittingly admits his approval rating is in the toilet

| 3:48 pm EST January 17, 2017
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It may seem to some observers that Donald Trump is getting away with his antics and scandals. But if you take a look at his approval rating, which one major poll has pegged at a historically low 37%, you’ll see that he’s not getting away with it. As a result of being so unpopular, he’ll enter office with so little political capital, that he’ll have a hard time carrying out most of his agenda. And today Trump finally addressed his massive unpopularity, though he tried to deny it — and ended up unwittingly confirming it instead.

Trump’s defensive tweet-missive today went like this: “The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before.” But here’s the problem: the general election polls turned out to be more or less correct. The final polls before Election Day had Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by an average of around four points. And in the end, Hillary beat Trump in the popular vote by just over two points.

That means the polls were only off by two points, which is within the margin of error, and considered statistically accurate. So the polls more or less correctly predicted Trump’s popular vote loss. Moreover, if his argument is that his approval rating is inaccurate because the general election polls were inaccurate, then at best he’s arguing that his approval rating might be two points higher than it is. In other words he’s insisting that his approval rating is closer to 39% than 37%, which is still historically in the toilet.