A new survey on Donald Trump’s performance as president reveals a historic gap between Republicans and Democrats.
The Gallup poll found that just 2% of Democrats now approve of Trump’s handling of the presidency, while 91% of Republicans do.
That 89-point rift is “the largest partisan gap Gallup as ever measured for a presidential approval rating in a single survey,” the polling organization says.
The national survey, Gallup reports, found that “Trump’s approval rating is holding steady at a lower level after a sharp drop in late May and early June, with 38% of Americans currently approving of the job he is doing.”
That “lower level” may be fairly steady now, but it got there in a hurry between late May and early June, when it plummeted 11 points.
Other numbers highlighted by the poll look just as bad for Trump, especially because he is losing ground among voters who previously supported him. And his views on race are at the heart of it.
“Trump now has approval ratings below the majority level among groups that are typically more favorable to him, including non-Hispanic white Americans, men, older Americans, Southerners and those without a college degree,” writes columnist Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post.
He’s in positive territory only with non-college-educated white males.
Rubin points out that the latest polling took place in June, “before the soaring coronavirus rates were fully recognized.”
That period included the widespread Black Lives Matter protests; fallout from the assault on peaceful protesters near the White House; Trump’s refusal to remove Confederate names from military bases and his objection to taking down Confederate statues.
“It was a month of cultural — really, racial — warfare. And Trump, it seems, has lost decisively,” Rubin writes.
Then there’s the long-running fight over certain professional sports team-names that so many Native Americans find offensive:
On Monday, Trump seemed to go out of his way to dig that losing, racist hole even deeper, with a tweet blasting the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians for considering name changes — and adding an extraneous dig at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has claimed some Native American heritage.
In her column, Rubin calls it “comforting” that so many Americans refuse to believe the “phony rationalizations for Trump’s racist views.” She sees “a reckoning of enormous proportions” coming on election day.
“Just as Confederates had to be vanquished on the battlefield, their modern-day successors must be obliterated at the ballot box,” Rubin writes.
