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But hey, let's try to put a positive spin on it... at least Big B is still ahead of his Veep Kum-a-lot, whose approval rating has skidded to a measly 28%!
Anyone recall how low Nixon's approval rating was when he resigned the Presidency in 1974?
Originally Posted by lustylad
Around 24%, according to a few published reports at the time.
I suspect that if Kamala, as seems likely, ascends to the presidency at some time during the next three years, she'll give ol' Tricky Dick a serious run for his money!
The low 20s seems about the deepest descent possible, as explained by a history prof from an unspecified university on Quora a few years ago:
(The follwong is a copy & paste from quora.com)
In the broadest sense, Nixon’s surprising level of approval on the eve of his resignation means that there is probably a level of approval below which no President can fall.
Don’t get me wrong, 25% is abysmal. (Technically, Nixon’s lowest approval rating was 24% just prior to his resignation in August 1974, but that’s not statistically very different from 25%.) But you’d think it’d be worse given the circumstances. So how do we explain it?
Two years prior to his resignation, Nixon had won the largest landslide in American presidential history; he won a bit over 60% of the popular vote, and 520 of 538 electoral votes; he won 49 of 50 states. That is to say, there were a LOT of people in the country who had voted for Richard Nixon less than two years before he resigned.
And here’s the thing: people don’t like to admit when they are wrong. From a cognitive standpoint, it is a difficult thing to confront the idea that you made a bad choice in supporting someone. Certainly, Presidents do occasionally lose re-election. But that seems to be at least partially the result of dissatisfied supporters staying home rather than switching to support someone else. Yes, there absolutely are voters who will choose to support a different candidate in the next election because they are angry or dissatisfied with the one who they voted for last time. But it takes a lot to get large numbers of people to that point, where they say, “I made a mistake last time, and now I am going to correct it.”
Presidential approval ratings operate along the same basis. Some people who will say they “disapprove” of a President’s job performance may still be inclined to support them when the choice is between them and a member of the other political party. But strong supporters will take a long time to really abandon someone they previously had a strong sense of attachment to. A lot of Nixon voters did in fact turn against him, but the process was far more gradual than you’d think. As for those who continued to support him, well, partisanship is a powerful drug. There are some people who identify so strongly with their party — and so strongly against the other party — that they’ll never turn on a president from their party. Add to that the fact that there are some people who do not follow politics or the news very much at all, and might have only been dimly aware of the extent of criminal activity uncovered within the Nixon administration during the Watergate investigations. And if you’re not following the news very closely — if you’re just just picking up on little bits and pieces that you can’t completely tune out, and that lack any real context — then it’s easier to conclude that the information is false or inaccurate.
So if you had interviewed someone who counted among the 24-25% of voters who still approved of Nixon at the very end of his Presidency, you’d likely have heard some of the following explanations. (This is informed speculation on my part, rather than actual quotes from real people. Make of that what you will.)
“He’s my President and he has my support no matter what.”
“I don’t know what the whole fuss is about this Watergate mess is. President Nixon says he didn’t do anything wrong and I believe him.”
“The whole thing sounds like a conspiracy against the President to me. The media and the Democrats are out to get him.” (yes, people DID say things like this back then, and Nixon himself tried to cast Watergate this way.)
Now, the question may be asked what this means for Trump. The implications for Trump are the same as those for any President, really: there is a probably a level of support below which he cannot fall. Twenty-five percent seems to be pretty close to the floor; George W. Bush hit that number a few times over his last year in office but never went below that point despite the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and an unpopular war in Iraq.
The lowest presidential approval rating ever recorded goes to Harry Truman, at 22% in February of 1952. But we only have approval ratings that date back to Truman’s presidency; modern opinion polling was really just getting started in the 1940s.
But the low to mid 20’s seems to be the floor of a President’s support for as long as we’ve been able to measure it.
So for Trump, it means that no matter what he does or how the various scandals and investigation swirling around him play out, he’s unlikely to fall below that point. And he’s nowhere close to that low right now; his approval, on average, has been in the low to mid 40’s for a while.
But while a certain percentage of voters will apparently never abandon a sitting President, that floor of support is not enough to be leveraged as political capital. Any president whose support falls that low is not going to get much done, even if they stay in office.
-- Professor William Murphy, 2018