Donald Trump is hemorrhaging supporters by the millions
One of the most persistent myths of the Donald Trump era is that his supporters won’t abandon him no matter what he does. The media promotes that myth by basing its coverage around “Trump’s base.” Even many anti-Trump Americans have pessimistically accepted the premise that Trump’s supporters can’t be turned against him. And Trump himself seems to believe it. But the numbers actually prove the opposite – and they tell a major story that virtually no one is reporting.
At the time Donald Trump took office, the average of the then-current polls pegged his approval rating in the mid forties. At present, the average of current polls pegs his approval rating in the mid thirties. Losing ten points may not sound like a meaningful shift on a theoretical scale of zero to a hundred. But as a practical matter, any president with an approval rating above fifty is considered popular and safe. And any president with an approval rating under thirty is in such trouble that even his own party might consider impeaching him just to get rid of the liability. So just how many supporters has Trump lost?
Approval ratings are a sampling of the entire country. While there are approximately 325 million people in the United States, there are closer to 250 million adults over the age of eighteen in the United States, so we’ll limit this just to adults. Trump has lost around ten percent of Americans since January, so that means he’s lost around 25 million Americans. He’s been in office for just over seven months, so he’s lost an average of around 3.57 million supporters per month.
There are ways to quibble with the above math. For instance, depending on ones methodology in averaging the polls, one could argue that Trump hasn’t lost ten percent of the country, he’s instead lost nine percent or eleven percent. But that would only slightly alter the mathematical outcome. The bottom line is that Donald Trump has been losing more than three million supporters per month since taking office. Other new presidents have lost support in their first year, but none of them were remotely this unpopular to begin with. Trump is hemorrhaging supporters, despite having entered office in a position where he couldn’t afford to lose any. So much for the idea that none of Trump’s people would abandon him. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.
