Story highlights
List of states includes a number of 2016 battlegrounds
Two surprises on the list are Indiana and Texas
More Americans disapprove of President Donald Trump’s job performance than approve of it across 31 states nationwide – including 11 states that voted for him in November.
The list of states that went Trump’s way but where his approval is now underwater includes some battlegrounds where Trump barely won – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida – and other swing states like Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina. The list also includes the light-red states of Georgia and Arizona, where Democrats were optimistic in 2016. The two surprises on the list: Indiana and Texas.
North Carolina takes the prize for the worst net job approval rating in a state Trump won: 42% approve and 53% disapprove. Here’s how the rest of the states break down:
Trump’s approval rating over the last three months from Gallup – at 39% – set a new record low in second quarter approval ratings for new presidents back to 1945.
The new data comes from more than 81,000 interviews with Americans conducted by Gallup since Inauguration Day. The margin of error is ±4 percentage points in most states and becomes no greater than ±8 percentage points in any states.
Texas and Indiana mark the widest differences in this set of states between Trump’s margin of victory in November and his net job approval now.
Trump carried Indiana, the home state of Vice President Mike Pence, by a broad 19 points in 2016, but he’s 1 point underwater there now. And in Texas, Trump won by 9 points in November, but he’s 9 points underwater over his six months in office.
A detailed analysis of the data shows the difference between the percentage who approve of Trump and percentage who voted for him in 2016 is larger than the national average almost exclusively in states that supported Trump.
Trump earned 46% of the vote in the 2016 election and he has a 40% approval rating among all adults over his first six months.
This comparison shouldn’t be viewed as apples-to-apples for movement: Trump’s job approval ratings among all Americans after Inauguration Day is a different issue among a different group than the share of the vote he received among the actual electorate in November. (Only 56% of the voting-age population cast ballots in 2016, according to the US Census Bureau.)
Still, Trump won 17 of the 19 states where the difference between his approval rating and his share of the vote was greater than the national average, perhaps signaling that some in red states who were giving Trump the benefit of the doubt may be running out of patience now.
That compares to 13 of the 31 states Trump won where this difference was less than the national average. Only Utah and Hawaii have Trump approval ratings higher than the share of the vote he received in the 2016 election.
Trump tweeted last week that an approval of nearly 40% was “not bad at this time,” despite the historical precedent.