Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may bear the brunt of the fallout from the GOP’s failed health care bill. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing has failed to gin up strong liberal opposition. And President Trump’s climate agenda is out of step with most Americans’ views. This is HuffPollster for Friday, March 31, 2017.
PAUL RYAN’S APPROVAL RATING DROPS IN WAKE OF AHCA FIASCO - Kathy Frankovic: “The latest Economist/YouGov Poll suggests that opinions of Ryan and the House Republicans, but not President Trump, have diminished after the GOP-majority House of Representatives failed to vote on the proposed health care legislation. And that loss of support comes almost entirely from Republicans and Trump voters — not Democrats. Last week, 59% of Republicans and 55% of Trump voters approved of the way Paul Ryan was handling his job as Speaker of the House. This week, approval dropped 12 points among both groups. In fact, as of now, slightly more Trump voters disapprove of Ryan’s performance than approve. Overall, Ryan’s job approval rating is negative: 49% of the public disapproves — nearly doubling those who approve. Meanwhile, there has been almost no change in how the public evaluates Donald Trump’s performance as President: 41% of the public approves; 47% disapproves. That is about the same as last week.” [YouGov]
A spike in negatives - HuffPost Pollster’s average gives Ryan an average net favorability rating of -11. Nearly 47 percent view him unfavorably, up from about 40 percent at the beginning of the year. [Paul Ryan chart]
NEIL GORSUCH CONFIRMATION DRAWS LITTLE OPPOSITION - HuffPollster: “A plurality of the public thinks the Senate should vote to confirm Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice, according to a newly released HuffPost/YouGov poll, although many say they’ve paid relatively little attention to the process. Americans say by a 17-percentage-point margin, 40 percent to 23 percent, that Gorsuch, the federal appeals judge nominated by President Donald Trump to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia, should be confirmed….Voters who supported Trump are overwhelmingly aligned in favor of Gorsuch: 87 percent think the Senate should confirm him, and just 3 percent say that it shouldn’t. In contrast, while most Clinton voters oppose the nomination, they do so less strongly.” [HuffPost]
AMERICANS DON’T AGREE WITH TRUMP’S HARDLINE STANCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE - Alexander C. Kaufman, on a new HuffPost/YouGov survey: “A 55 percent majority of Americans support remaining in the Paris Agreement, the first global deal focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that includes the U.S. and China....White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said earlier this month that the administration considers taxpayer-funded research on climate change to be a ‘waste of your money.’ A vast plurality of the public disagrees, with 49 percent saying the EPA should fund climate research, compared with 28 percent declaring the opposite and 23 percent unsure. The Energy Star program, a voluntary initiative that certifies buildings and appliances for energy efficiency, proved popular, with 57 percent of those surveyed saying the EPA should continue to fund the bulk of its $57 million budget, versus just 19 percent who support defunding it with 23 percent unsure.” [HuffPost, more on environmental polling from WashPost]
TRUMP GETS RELATIVELY HIGH MARKS ON ECONOMY - Laurie Kellman and Emily Swanson: “Most Americans disapprove of Donald Trump’s overall performance two months into his presidency. But they’re more upbeat about at least one critical area: his handling of the economy. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s overall performance, and about the same percentage say the country is headed in the wrong direction, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It was conducted amid the collapse of the GOP’s health care overhaul. But the poll also found a brighter spot for the businessman-politician on the economy, often a major driver of presidential success or failure. There, Americans split about evenly, with 50 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving of Trump’s efforts.” [AP]
What the poll averages show - As of Friday morning, HuffPost Pollster’s aggregation gives Trump an overall net -15 approval rating. He stands at -9 on foreign policy, and -16 on health care, but +2 for his handling of the economy. [Pollster]
MILLENNIALS IN ‘TRUMP COUNTRY’ IN 2016 ARE MORE OPTIMISTIC THAN THEIR PEERS - HuffPollster: “While the average young voter is pessimistic about the direction of the U.S., millennials who voted in counties favoring President Donald Trump in the 2016 election are the most optimistic age group. Surveys of people whose ages range anywhere from 18-34 show younger voters are the most likely to say the country is on the wrong track. However, in a new poll from [the GOP firm] Echelon Insights, young voters in ‘Trump country’ were the most likely to say the country is headed in the right direction...The Millennials surveyed rated Trump’s job performance the highest out of any age group ― with 57 percent approving and 36 percent disapproving.” [HuffPost]
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIRST MONTHS IN OFFICE MARKED BY ‘SURGE’ OF PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISM - HuffPollster: “[According to polling from SurveyMonkey,] self-described liberal Democrats are more than twice as likely as the public as a whole to say they’ve engaged in some form of activism during the past two months. That ratio extends to a wide variety of actions, with liberal Democrats roughly two times likelier to report having shared opinions on social media, signed petitions, written to Congress, donated money, protested and attended local meetings….’I think there was something really catalyzing about this election, for women in particular,’ said Laura Moser, a newly minted activist and the founder of a text-message-based system called Daily Action….The activists flooding congressional offices with those calls are overwhelmingly female, according to a survey conducted by Democratic pollsters Lake Research Partners and shared with HuffPost….But it remains to be seen if progressive’s current level of enthusiasm can last through the 2018 midterms.” [HuffPost, More from SurveyMonkey]
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FRIDAY’S ‘OUTLIERS’ - Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:
-Ryne Rohla shares the results of a project to map last year’s election results by precinct. [Decision Desk HQ]
-NORC releases the results of the 2016 General Social Survey, along with a new feature for visualizing trends. [GSS]
-Mark Blumenthal takes a closer look at President Trump’s approval ratings. [HuffPost]
-Philip Bump notes that Republican distrust in the media rises during presidential elections. [WashPost]
-A new Monmouth poll shows that people tend to trust the media over Trump. [Monmouth]
-Ben Casselman investigates the controversy around the omission of sexual orientation questions in the 2020 census. [538]
-Nate Cohn examines the special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district. [NYT]
-Alissa Scheller and Jonathan Cohn find that efforts to undermine Obamacare could hit Trump-leaning areas the hardest. [HuffPost]
-Republican pollster Chris Wilson argues that the GOP’s health care bill would have been an albatross in 2018 . [Medium]
-A “statistical review of the world’s foremost source for professional dog ratings” reveals that good dogs are getting even better. [David Montgomery]
-”Gallup’s Trump approval trend looks like an alligator.” [@_cingraham]