Donald Trump wraps up a year in office with the lowest average approval rating of any elected president in his first year.
That is according to polling by Gallup, which shows that Trump has averaged just a 39% approval rating since his inauguration. The previous low was held by Bill Clinton, whose first-year average stood 10 points higher than Trump’s, at 49%.
Recent surveys show most Americans view Trump as a divisive figure and even question his fitness for office. One relative bright spot for Trump is his handling of the economy, though even there his ratings are not as high as might be expected given a relatively strong economy.
Trump’s current approval rating in Gallup’s weekly poll is comparable to his average rating, standing at just 38%, with 57% saying they disapprove.
The persistence of Trump’s first-year blues is unprecedented for a president so early in his term. Americans usually give their new presidents the benefit of the doubt, but Trump’s “honeymoon period”, to the extent he had one, saw his approval rating only get as high as 45%.
Since then, Trump has spent more time under 40% than any other first-year president.
Presidents have recovered from periods of low popularity before. For example, Clinton’s rating fell to just 37% in June 1993 before quickly regaining ground, and he went on to win re-election in 1996. Harry S Truman held the approval of less than 40% of Americans for significant chunks of his first term and was also re-elected. He went on to set Gallup’s lowest-ever approval mark, at just 22% in 1952.
Trump’s lowest point in Gallup’s weekly polling – 35% – remains higher than those of several earlier presidents. Truman, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter all had their ratings dip under 30%.
Strong suits
There are not many bright spots for Trump, but there are some. For one, most Republicans continue to approve of him – 83% of registered voters who identify as Republicans, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll.
The same poll found that most voters overall find Trump to be intelligent and a strong person.
And positive ratings for Trump’s handling of the economy have tended to run higher than his overall job ratings.
In a December poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, Trump’s rating on handling the economy was 8 percentage points higher than his overall approval, though even that stood at just 40% in the survey, which was a particularly negative one for Trump.
In the Quinnipiac poll, voters were more likely to say Trump is helping the economy than hurting it, 37% to 29%. On the other hand, more said Barack Obama deserves the credit more than Trump does, 49% to 40%.
On the issues
Aside from the economy, surveys have suggested few policy bright spots for Trump.
Healthcare has been a consistent low point. Seven in 10 Americans in the December AP-NORC poll said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the issue, even as 85% called the issue very important to them personally.
In another AP-NORC poll conducted late in 2017, just 23% of Americans said he has kept the promises he made while running for president, while 30% said he has tried and failed and 45% said he has not done so at all. More than half said the country is worse off since Trump became president.
That poll was conducted before the passage of a tax bill that Trump signed into law in late December, but there is little sign that the law will have an immediate positive impact. A Gallup poll conducted in January found that just 33% of Americans approved of the legislation.
Character concerns
But it may be character more than policy that is driving negative opinions of Trump. In the January poll by Quinnipiac University, most voters said Trump is not level-headed, honest or even fit to serve as president.
And the AP-NORC poll conducted in December found that two-thirds of Americans thought the country has become even more divided as a result of Trump’s presidency.
In a July Gallup poll that asked those who disapproved of Trump for their reasons why, most cited his personality or character over issues, policies or overall job performance. That stood in stark contrast to Gallup’s polling on Obama in 2009 and George W Bush in 2001, when far fewer cited such concerns about personality or character as reasons for their negative opinions.