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Last week was a rough one for President Donald Trump, but a new set of polls confirms that he can still count on the unwavering support of a portion of the electorate.
Here’s what happened: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight federal charges, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, was found guilty of eight crimes of his own. Cohen implicated the president in his crimes, and the president seemed to confess to his involvement in campaign finance violations on national television.
Despite the string of negative headlines, Trump’s popularity isn’t tanking with the American public. He’s not a very popular president in the first place, but the increased focus on the criminals around him didn’t make things worse, according to a pair of polls conducted jointly by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News.
A WSJ/NBC News survey taken mostly before last Tuesday, the day of Cohen’s guilty plea and Manafort’s jury verdict, found that Trump’s approval rating was at 46 percent among registered voters. A separate WSJ/NBC News poll conducted after Tuesday found Trump’s approval rating was at 44 percent.
All that news, and Trump’s approval rating dipped by 2 percentage points — within the margin of error, meaning it might not have moved at all.
But if it holds across other polls, a 2-point drop “would be a reasonably big shift,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver pointed out on Twitter. In other words, it’s possible that last week’s legal drama made a difference, but it’s not a given.
