As Republicans contemplate their future without Donald Trump as president, the party is still very much in his control. A majority of House Republicans and several senators decided to follow him all the way over the cliff in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. There are few that would be willing to admit that Trump’s months of false claims that the election was stolen has anything to do with the deadly Capitol riot. And Ronna McDaniel, Trump’s choice, remains as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
We cannot expect Republican politicians to have moral courage, which is one of the insights that helped fuel Trump’s successful rise in the party. But one would think, at some point, more members of the party would realize how damaging it would be to tie their fortunes to such an extremely unpopular figure.
Gallup, which has polled every president since Harry Truman, is out with its final poll of the Trump presidency, and it shows him to be historically unpopular.
He leaves office with a 34% approval rating as a lame duck, which is tied with Presidents George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and just above the worst in history, Truman’s 32% during the Korean War. (President Richard Nixon had a lower approval at the time of his resignation).
This, however, is relatively good news for Trump.
Over the course of his presidency, Trump averaged approval of 41.1% — the lowest by 4 points compared with any other post-World War II president. Even Carter was at 45.5%.
Furthermore, his highest level was 49% — at a moment earlier this year, during which he briefly took the fight against coronavirus seriously. He is the first president of the polling era who has never, at any point in his presidency, had a majority of the country approving of him.
In terms of his political record, it’s worth noting that Trump was elected in 2016 against a deeply unpopular Democratic nominee after winning several swing states by a small margin. After that, it’s been all downhill. He lost Republicans the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020. Republicans are completely out of power in Washington for the first time in a decade, and it’s largely thanks to Trump. He turned reliably Republican suburbs into Democratic strongholds simply because he turned off so many voters.
Typically, when presidents are deeply unpopular, the party cannot wait to run away from them.
Nobody, in 1974, wanted to run as a Nixon Republican. In 1981, nobody wanted to run for office as a Carter Democrat. In the 2008 election, Republicans started running away from Bush before he even left the White House. He did not even attend that year’s RNC and has never spoken at one in-person since leaving office.
Yet Republicans, who managed to win the presidency, Senate, and House, before Trump had even entered politics, are acting like the only path for them to regain power is to attach themselves to Trump like barnacles.
The challenge Republicans face, of course, is that there is a deep disconnect between Republican voters and the general electorate. Though down from the upper 80s, Trump still leaves the presidency with 82% of Republicans approving of his performance. In deep-red districts, this means those who get in Trump’s crosshairs risk a primary challenge. The problem is, just 30% of independents approve of Trump, meaning that as long as the party is tied to him, they will have difficulty winning outside of already deeply Republican areas, which they would expect to win no matter what.
So, while it might get ugly, the data are pretty clear that for Republicans to advance as a party, they are going to have to find a way to divorce themselves from Trump.
