On Friday, President Trump’s approval rating hit 45.8 percent — the highest since January 25, 2017, according to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. The timing suggests that the increase in his popularity is related to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which most Americans think he is managing well.
Trump may be experiencing what political scientists call the “rally-around-the-flag” effect, when national leaders temporarily get more popular amid international crises. Usually, you hear about people rallying around the flag after terrorist attacks or outbreaks of war, but the coronavirus pandemic could qualify in that it too poses an imminent threat to American safety. “When a country is faced with a common threat that touches everybody, there is a tendency to unify and to look toward the leader,” Shoon Murray, a political scientist who has studied the rally-around-the-flag effect, told FiveThirtyEight. “The sense of emergency is now so high and widespread that it’s possible people could rally around the president if he was perceived as taking steps in a nonpartisan way to mitigate the crisis.”
ut natural disasters don’t always produce rally-around-the-flag effects. In the context of hurricanes in the U.S., we’ve seen that the government’s response to disasters can drive public opinion either up or down. For instance, governors who were perceived as handling relief efforts in their states well, like then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2004, saw their approval ratings skyrocket. But others, like then-Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who was criticized for her slow response to Hurricane Katrina, emerged from the disasters with their reputations in tatters. Essentially, a national emergency gives people a new, extremely important issue on which to grade their leaders’ performance.
Despite Trump’s solid approval numbers on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans aren’t as enthusiastic about it as residents of some other countries are about their leaders’ responses. That could explain why Trump’s overall approval rating hasn’t risen nearly as much as some other world leaders’. According to Morning Consult, Trump’s net approval rating rose 5 percentage points from March 11 (the day the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus crisis a pandemic) to March 24,1 ranking sixth among the nine major world leaders Morning Consult polled. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau all experienced increases of more than 20 points in their net approval ratings.
Maybe a bigger question is whether Trump can sustain this higher approval rating, especially as critiques of how he’s handling the crisis are likely to intensify as the general election heats up. Political science research gives us some clues to predicting how long such a bump might last. One study found that heightened national unity triggers the rally-around-the-flag effect, but how long the president’s dissenters stay quiet dictates its duration. Assuming that Democrats continue to criticize Trump’s coronavirus response, this suggests Trump will fall back to earth relatively soon.
If the metaphor of the U.S. being at war with the coronavirus is an apt one, a higher number of deaths from COVID-19 may bring Trump’s approval rating down as well. A long line of political science research shows that high numbers of American casualties make a war, and the president waging it, less popular. On the flip side, other studies argue that a wartime president’s approval rating will remain high as long as the war is seen as successful.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wh ... l-ratings/
As this continues to drag out and the death rate goes up and the country is reminded of all of his missteps and misinformation, it could do Trump in. Or it could work the opposite direction. Much too early to tell.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan
