We have the first poling that includes some post-debate data, and it’s good news for President Donald Trump.
According to Rasmussen, after including one night of post-debate polling in its five-day rolling average, Trump’s job approval rating climbed from 46 to 49 percent, while his job disapproval number dropped from 53 to 51 percent.
That is a six-point shift in Trump’s direction.
Rasmussen explains, “This survey is the first to include a night of polling following the first presidential debate between Trump and Democrat nominee Joe Biden…. By next Monday morning, all 1,500 voters in the daily tracking survey will have been polled following Tuesday night’s contentious debate.”
“The president’s approval ran in the low 50s for 10 days through the end of last week but dropped as low as 46% in the first three days of this week following his nomination Saturday of federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Rasmussen adds. “Now his approval appears to be on the rise again.”
Rasmussen believes that Trump’s decision to fill the late-Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat might have killed Trump’s 50-plus, ten day, job approval winning streak. That’s a reasonable assumption. The first reaction from a whole lot of people was negative and the media told a lot of lies about how filling a seat this close to an election is unprecedented (it’s not).
Since last week though, Trump and the GOP have done a good job making their case for filling the seat, so people might be settling down a bit, getting used to the idea.
In other words, that might have more to do with Trump’s post-debate approval bump than the debate.
At this point it’s just too early to definitively say if the debate had any effect on Trump’s numbers in either direction. We’ll know more next week. But this is the first post-debate data we have, which makes it noteworthy.
Two more polls have more good news for Trump, but neither include post-debate data.
Harvard-Harris polled 1,314 registered voters between September 22 and 24, and found that Trump has a 47 percent job approval rating and 53 percent disapproval rating, which is an improvement over the 46 to 54 approve/disapprove from late in August.
Gallup had even better news. Its rolling survey of 1,023 adults taken between Sept 14 and 28 shows that Trump’s job approval rating jumped four points, from 42 to 46 percent, his best showing since May.
Also, 56 percent of those polled by Gallup believe Trump will win the upcoming election, compared to just 40 percent who say the same about Joe Biden.
What’s more, Gallup says that since it began asking this question in 1996, the public has correctly picked the winner of the popular vote — not the winner of the presidency. Meaning that in 2000, those polled on the question of who will win the upcoming election chose Al Gore. He did win the popular vote, but lose the Electoral College. Same with Hillary Clinton in 2016.
As of right now, in the RealClearPolitics poll of polls, Trump enjoys a 45.5 percent job approval rating and a 53 percent disapproval rating.
There’s no questions his numbers were improving prior to the debate. We’ll just have to wait until next week to see how or if the debate affects his standing.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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