Trump sees positive approval rating amid coronavirus: Poll

Cabot Phillips, Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief, and Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers joins Zack Guzman to discuss how President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus is helping to push his approval rating higher.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Right now, we're digging into the numbers concerning the job that American voters are saying they're seeing play out here by President Trump in response to the growing coronavirus crisis. And more and more Americans are saying that they approve of the way that the president has been handling it. And I want to get to Kristen Myers for the latest poll that we're getting from ABC showing that there's a growing amount of Americans jumping on the approval side. Kristen.

KRISTEN MYERS: Hey, Zach. Yeah, so as we've been seeing over the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump's approval rating has started to edge just ever so slightly. And I know we have a graphic on this. So I just want to quickly run through some of those numbers. So as it stands right now, the approval rating for President Trump is 45.5%. Now, just before we had our first coronavirus case here in the United States, his approval rating was 42.3%.

Now, I want to mention here that this is actually one of the highest approval ratings that he's had since he took office. I went all the way back to see his approval rating back in January of 2017, so right after he got into office. His approval rating then quickly spiked at the beginning up until around 47%. And it has trended downward steadily ever since then.

So what we're seeing, this pop seems to be off of the back of his response to coronavirus. Now, we're also seeing his disapproval rating starting to drop. Right before we had our first COVID 19 case here in the United States, his disapproval rating was around 53%. It is now at 50%. Now, Zack, talking about that poll that you just mentioned, that ABC News Washington Post poll, that's actually looking at the general election.

And what we are seeing there is that his approval, or rather the voters that say that they might vote for him, starting to tick up ever so slightly, especially when compared to Former Vice President and presidential candidate Joe Biden. Right now, Biden is still up 2%. 49% percent of voters say they're going to be going for him in November in the general, 47% say they are going to be voting for Trump.

Of course, who knows what's going to happen. I think a lot of people aren't even thinking about the election anymore now that we have coronavirus and the crisis hitting us. So we'll have to see exactly how those numbers continue to change over the next coming weeks.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, a lot could happen before we get to November. But for more on the actual tactics here, I want to bring on Cabot Phillips. He's Campus Reform editor in chief and friend of the show. Cabot, when we look at this, it obviously changes the way that Joe Biden might be able to respond to it. Because we've been talking so long about how approval numbers are expected to go up in what kind of is referred to as a wartime president. Of course, you know, the war here is a little bit different. But we aren't seeing the same trend, as Kristen just outlined there.

Trump's approval rating continues to go higher, the shrinking of the distance against the polling that could see Joe Biden take the nomination, of course, from Bernie Sanders, and how he'd stack up against Trump. That's shrinking, as well. But what does that mean for Joe Biden here? How would he actually respond to the trend that Trump's catching here?

CABOT PHILLIPS: Well, I think his response is going to have to shift. Initially, when this happened, when the news started to focus solely on COVID 19, I talked to some Democratic strategists. And they said this actually could be a godsend for the Democrat Party. Because Joe Biden on the campaign trail is prone to gaffs. He's prone to, when he has a lot of cameras in his face, making some moments that aren't great for the campaign.

And they said, maybe this is good. He can take a little bit of a backseat. The news won't be focused on him and on the 2020 race. And he can kind of cruise the nomination. But now, I think that all the air has been sucked up out of the cycle. And President Trump is dominating a lot of the news cycle. And it's actually playing fairly well for him, politically speaking. A lot of those same people in the Democrat Party are saying, well, wait a second, now our guy, our nominee, is kind of disappearing. And people are starting to forget about him entirely, which isn't good.

So I think we're going to see a more visible Joe Biden here in the next few weeks. We saw him come out with a few national televised town halls. He's starting to go more vocal on social media. The problem, though, is it's really hard to politicize something like this when a lot of people, especially those independent voters he's going after, aren't exactly craving political infighting right now. And so Biden, if he were to attack President Trump's handling of it, I don't think that would play well with the electorate.

So he's in a tough spot where he's trying not to completely disappear, but still trying to find a way to claw into the news cycle, which is difficult without some of that more bombastic rhetoric.

KRISTEN MYERS: Hey, Cabot, wondering how likely you think that, because everyone's attention right now is on coronavirus, how likely is it that, come November, people have just spent months not even thinking about the general election, and it could just essentially hand President Trump another victory?

CABOT PHILLIPS: It's very possible. It's tough to know, again, how long this is going to last. But if people do end up approving of President Trump's handling of the virus, when all is said and done-- we don't know how long that's going to be-- but it certainly could be a huge motivating factor for people saying, well, kind of that recency bias of, well, the last thing you really had to handle, he handled pretty well.

And I think there's two reasons we've seen Trump benefit from this. First off is kind of that wartime president mentality. Americans like rallying around a leader, whether it was President Bush in 9/11, even Jimmy Carter, who was relatively unpopular up until the Iranian Hostage Crisis, where his approval rating spiked. So people could say, you know, we could have Joe Exotic as president and people would rally around him, and the approval ratings would go up because it's a wartime leader that people are rallying around.

And I think the second reason for that, beyond that mentality of Americans coming together, is also people are getting their information directly from President Trump. He always complains about saying people are forming their opinions of me based on what they hear in the media, based on what they read in the headlines and on social media. And now, every day, for better or worse, he is on TV, live, speaking directly to tens of millions of Americans.

So people are able to form their opinions directly based on what they're hearing. And regardless of your opinion of President Trump, I do think a lot of people are saying, wait a second, this isn't a guy that I thought he was. He seems more reasonable. He seems more in command here than I was expecting. And I think some people have been pleasantly surprised. And that's why I think you've seen some people in the middle there start to go towards him.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I mean, you can't deny that he is getting a lot more airtime with all these news conferences, as well. It's kind of a repeat of what we saw in the last election when he did just kind of take over all of the media attention. And they paid it to him. And we saw the way that played out. Kristen I'm not sure if you had another question in regards to you. Mine was going to be the way that the Medicare response-- I know you've been covering that for us, in terms of how Americans might be thinking differently about Obamacare as we see Republicans--

KRISTEN MYERS: That's exactly was I was going to ask, Zack.

ZACK GUZMAN: Jump in, then! Go for it!

KRISTEN MYERS: Well, now, Cabot, I'm wondering how much you think that this crisis has started to make the electorate just generally a little bit more progressive? As we're seeing Americans now view, for example, Medicare for All, a lot more favorably. We've heard of a lot of Americans talking about stronger worker protections and extra pay throughout all of this. So even if a lot of people aren't paying attention to the election, when it is time, and when this all does hopefully blow over sooner rather than later, do you think voters are going to start looking at whoever the Democratic candidate is, up against Trump, and demanding some of these more progressive pieces of legislation that some of the Democrats have been pushing for?

CABOT PHILLIPS: I think it all depends on how this plays out. Obviously, it's going to be difficult to see whether or not this works in the short term. This is going to be a long-term issue. And I do think, for one, the Overton window has certainly shifted further to the left on the Democrat side. And so I do think there's pressure there for a lot of members of the Democrat caucus saying, hey, if I'm going to vote for this, you're going to have to throw some of the things in there that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

And so I do think the Overton window has shifted there, where I don't know if Republicans are necessarily embracing these things. I don't even know if the independents are. But a lot of Democrat House and Senate members are saying, if I'm going to support this, I've got to be able to go back to my constituents and say, well, look what I was able to get you in this bill.

It has been staggering, though, to see how the same Republican Party, the same conservative movement that, for the last 90 years has decried FDR's New Deal, and said this was a disaster, it prolonged the Great Depression, those same people are now turning around and passing the New Deal 2.0 with arguably just as long-reaching impact on the economy. And so it has been interesting to see a lot of those fiscal conservatives, fiscal hawks, now coming out and saying, no, no questions asked, $2 trillion, let's get it done right now.

And I think people are clamoring for action. Voters and average Americans, they want something done. And so I think that a lot of Republicans in office that maybe wouldn't have been as receptive to those ideas are saying, you know what, let's just get something done even if there's some stuff I don't like. Hard to see, though, how the electorate is going to perceive those things until we've had time to see if it actually works.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and I mean, you need not look any further into it than that unanimous vote we got in the Senate, as well. Everyone lined up to say, yep, I'm here for it. No one will know what the Tiger King would have voted on since he didn't get elected president. But clearly, someone watched it over the weekend. Cabot Phillips, thank you so much for joining us.

CABOT PHILLIPS: Thanks, guys.

ZACK GUZMAN: Stay safe out there in DC.