Please stop treating Trump's daily approval ratings like the temperature
By Philip Bump May 15 at 4:03 PM
I spend a lot of time looking at political Twitter because I am a damaged human being whose undiagnosed masochism is clearly burbling just beneath the surface. In doing so, I will see with some regularity a tweet talking about how the new Gallup daily job approval rating has Trump up X percent or down Y percent and how that means that the thing he did or didnt do yesterday or the day prior is dooming or buoying his presidency. Thats sort of an exaggeration, but not much. Its tracked the way a normal person might eyeball the temperature, particularly on Twitter where the community rumbles through about 19 obsessions a day.
Its also very misleading.
Heres what Trumps daily approval rating looks like.
A lot of volatility, certainly! But lets step away from Gallup for a second.
During the campaign, RealClearPoliticss Sean Trende raised a point thats related. He was lamenting that fewer national polls meant that there was necessarily more daily volatility. Why? Because polling averages tend to smooth out fluctuations based on margins of error. In Gallups daily poll (actually itself an average of the past three days of responses), the margin of error is plus or minus 3 points. So it looks like this:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/05/15/please-stop-treating-trumps-daily-approval-ratings-like-the-temperature/?utm_term=.91bcec85251f&wpisrc=nl_politics&wpmm=1