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Donald Trump is changing how the public thinks — usually by making stuff he’s against more popular.
It’s not unusual for public opinion on policy issues to swing in the opposite direction of the views of the president of the United States. James Stimson’s book Tides of Consent is built heavily around this observation and its implications. But Donald Trump is unprecedentedly unpopular for a president this early in his term and began his presidency having lost the popular vote by a wide margin.
Consequently, the tide seems to be going out at an unusually rapid pace.
Consider a few recent poll results:
- A Reuters poll released on October 3 “found that the percentage of adults who said they had a ‘great deal’ or ‘some’ confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November.”
- On October 2 USA Today poll found that previously unpopular NFL player protests are now seen as appropriate by a 51 to 42 percent margin.
- A Fox News poll in late September found the number of people who favor deporting illegal immigrants working in the United States had halved since the summer of 2015, with a staggering 83 to 14 margin in favor of a path to citizenship.
- Gallup found on October 2 that support for more government action to solve national problems has risen to 45 percent, the highest it’s been in decades outside of a brief post-9/11 spike.
- ABC News found on September 28 that “more than half of Americans now see climate change as responsible for the severity of recent hurricanes — an about-face from 12 years ago, when most attributed it to happenstance.”
You should always take issue polling with several grains of salt. Most people don’t have strongly held views on most subjects, and poll results on these kinds of questions are normally highly sensitive to question wording. But opinion trends on identically phrased questions do tell a story, and the story they are telling is that on issue after issue the tides of opinion are shifting against Trump. That’s true on big, slow-moving policy topics like climate change, it’s true on hot-button controversies like the NFL protests, and we’ve seen that it’s true on big congressional controversies.
The Affordable Care Act’s popularity soared to unprecedented heights when the public was focused on GOP repeal efforts.
This is one big reason that the relatively slow pace of legislative change under Trump is significant. Barack Obama and congressional Democrats largely exhausted the public’s patience with progressive governance over the course of two years, but they also made a lot of big policy changes that are proving hard to undo because American politics is heavily biased toward the status quo. Trump is exhausting the public’s patience with conservative governance at, if anything, a more rapid pace. But he’s not delivering anything resembling the same scale of policy change.
