Residual hope for President Trump

While it might seem as if the squat job approval ratings for President Trump imply he is finished, the moral from the recent presidential election really should teach folks otherwise.  Clearly the opening trend for the President is quite weak.  And approval ratings in the 30% range, as we see in the chart below, are not the worst that any president has ever earned.  However, it is infrequent to see this low approval margin right out of the gate, particularly for recent leaders.  And there is not much precedent for a dramatic recovery in the job approvals at this point.  But a narrow opportunity does still exist for some time now. 

We show above that those who have low approval ratings (horizontal axis) at some point can often see large stochastic surges that a smug public (and White House) may again be caught off-guard by.  No different than what we see for the financial markets instability (or lack thereof!)  Incidentally we were cited on this same topic as the cover and most popular article this weekend, in WSJ’s MarketWatch.  The green colored presidents in the chart experienced nearly a 13% standard deviation gyration in their job approvals during their term(s) in office.  So this is a definite implication for somewhat of a potential that President Trump has to at some point leap back near the ½ mark in approvals.  While things look bad for him, don't judge so eagerly and therefore falsely count him out.

And as a universal matter, any president can sometimes rebound to a final approval rating that is significantly better than that of his lowest approval rating (this is particularly true when the President can maintain above a 30% rating that is somewhat a canary in a coal mine).  So while President Trump is perilously edging towards this danger zone, he might pull off the comeback that he is sometimes known for.  Delighted to continue to monitor this and be relay the probabilistic potential involved behind these survey gauges!

Endnote: for more on polling science see these search results.