Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

Making Sense of Trump's Disapproval Ratings

The numbers are very bad. Yet Obama, Clinton, and Reagan all spent plenty of time below water before winning second terms.

February 21, 2017 at 7:44 PM UTC

By Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Negative attention.
Photographer: Bilgin S. Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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The most important single thing to know about Donald Trump's approval ratings after his first month of the presidency is ... there is no one single thing. Both the measurement and importance of presidential approval are complicated subjects, with wide ramifications for both governing and future elections. So here's a start on getting up to speed on Trump and his approvals:

He's easily the least popular president one month in of the polling era, and likely the least popular president ever at this stage. Looking at the polling aggregators, HuffPollster has him at 43 percent approval, 51 percent disapprove.1487691560123 That's not very far above Barack Obama's worst numbers ever, and in fact Trump managed to equal Obama's worst-ever Gallup approval one day this weekend before climbing back up a bit.