President Trump launched a campaign blitz on Thursday, traveling to Texas and Oklahoma as he hopes to prevent a blue wave that could give Democrats control of one or both chambers of Congress. It’s not clear, though, whether Trump will help or hurt Republican election chances, given his historically low approval ratings and his repeated insistence that the economy is strong, even as many Americans tell pollsters that they are profoundly frustrated by current economic conditions and blame Trump policies for making things worse.
Trump on Wednesday framed the issue as a communications problem.
“I've done a very bad job of explaining how good the country is doing. We’re doing better than any country in the world economically,” he said at a Hispanic Heritage Month event at the White House. He insisted that the country “is doing better than it's ever done” and said he will be campaigning over the next month to spread that message.
“I'm going out — because nobody's selling it. I'm doing — we're doing an extremely poor job of promotion and an extremely great job of running the country,” Trump said.
Voters seem to feel otherwise. A new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that just 31% approve of Trump’s job performance while 69% disapprove, including 51% who strongly disapprove. Just 26% of those surveyed call the economy at least somewhat good, and the same percentage approve of Trump’s handling of it, a new low for the president across both his terms, while 73% disapprove.
Trump is clearly failing the contemporary version of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The AP poll finds that 46% say they and their family are worse off than when Trump returned to office, and six in 10 adults say that the national economy and the country as a whole are worse off now.
Affordability remains a major problem and prime political vulnerability. A paltry 17% of adults approve of Trump’s handling of the cost of living. About two-thirds of U.S. adults now blame Trump policies for higher-than-usual prices, and 69%, including more than half of Republicans, say he has fallen short of expectations when it comes to addressing the cost of living. Nearly half of those surveyed said they are extremely or very concerned about being able to afford gas and groceries, up from around 40% in July.
The AP-NORC poll of 2,140 adults was conducted September 24-28 and has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
Trump is scheduled to continue his campaign travel schedule in Alabama on Friday and Ohio on Saturday.
