RCP has an interesting way to look at approval ratings

UncleScoopy

Donald Trump’s net approval rating of -12.5 seems terrible.

But when you look at it in context, it tends to show that people hate Washington, and they don’t hate Trump much more or less than the Democratic leaders, whose net approval ratings are almost identical to Trump’s

Nancy Pelosi -13.3
Chuck Schumer -12.4

There is one person people hate more than Trump – Mitch McConnell at -23. Hating him is the one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on. Yet McConnell may wield the most power of any of them.

2 thoughts on “RCP has an interesting way to look at approval ratings”

  1. Real Clear Politics… was that one of them that claimed Trump had like a 3% chance of winning in 2016? Yeah, I’ll take these numbers with a huge grain of salt.

    1. RCP did a great job in 2016.

      First of all, RCP does not conduct polls. They aggregate them. RCP’s summary of polls indicated that Hillary would win the popular vote by 3.3 points. She actually won by 2.1. That’s as close as you can reasonably expect in the real world. Hillary actually did a little better than expected, but the third-party candidates did much worse (they lost a third of their supporters on election day), and their voters swung heavily to Trump. The entire (tiny) difference between the polls’ predicted margin and the actual margin came from the Trump strength among people who said they would vote for a third party candidate versus those who actually did.

      At this moment, the pollsters have not figured out the formula which determines how many alleged third party voters will get cold feet about that vote when they realize the possible consequences, and which way they will tip when they decide to vote for a major party candidate.

      Also, RCP’s analysis on November 7th noted the tremendous last-minute swing to Trump, “No major party presidential candidate in 2012, 2008 or 2004 improved their national standing by more than two points in the two weeks prior to the Monday before Election Day, yet Trump has improved his polling by about three points in that interval.”

      They absolutely did NOT definitively predict a Hillary win. They noted she was the favorite, but struck an appropriate note of caution. Their final take on election eve was this:

      “Does momentum or current polling signal definitively that either candidate will win?

      No.”

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