Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist

What's So Stable About This White House? The Ratings

Jonathan Bernstein's morning links.

March 26, 2018 at 2:25 PM UTC

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.

Stable genius.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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President Donald Trump's approval ratings have been remarkably stable, a bizarre contrast to all the news out of his administration. The Fix's Philip Bump revives the argument that it's less about Trump than it is about partisan polarization: We all have such strong attachments to our parties, especially the "negative partisanship" of hating the other party, that presidential approval is now always going to be stable since all it reflects is tribalism.

I still think that conclusion is flat-out wrong.