With its huge national audience, the State of the Union address stands as a premier example of what the late political scientist Richard Neustadt famously described as the most important presidential asset of all, “the power to persuade.”
This year’s speech, though, is more likely to showcase how Donald Trump remains focused on a different lever of presidential influence: “the power to incite” those who already agree with him
Like his predecessors, Trump can probably expect a big audience for tonight’s State of the Union address. But it’s much less certain that most Americans are open to hearing anything new he has to say.
Halfway through his first term, Trump has engraved extraordinarily deep – and stable – lines of division in the public about his priorities, policies and personality. Though cheered by a passionate and seemingly immovable base of supporters, he has become the first president in the history of modern polling never to attract positive job approval ratings from at least half the country during his first two years. Rather than seeking to expand his support, Trump has focused almost all of his agenda and messaging on reinforcing and energizing the minority of voters deeply attached to him – a priority evident in his unrelenting focus on a border wall that most Americans consistently oppose in polls.
The result is a political landscape that looks as frozen as Lake Michigan during last week’s arctic blast. In the latest national CNN poll released Monday, attitudes about Trump’s job performance and agenda closely tracked the actual vote for Republicans in the 2018 House elections across a wide range of key demographic, partisan and ideological groups. Absent a major world event, or a dramatic change in the economy, few in either party expect those hardened patterns to shift much by the 2020 election. Republican pollster Whit Ayres offered a view widely shared among professionals on both sides when he was asked how much capacity Trump has to expand his support by the next election. “Virtually no ability,” Ayres said, “without a change in behavior or some stunning new event that shocks the political system.”
Because the State of the Union typically provides presidents their biggest and broadest audience of the year, they almost always use it to declare their commitment to reaching across party lines. In previews of the speech over the past week, the White House has signaled that Trump will be no exception. “Together we can break decades of political stalemate, we can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions and unlock the extraordinary promise of America’s future,” the president will say tonight, according to one excerpt the White House has released.
But the stability of attitudes toward Trump underscores how unlikely he is to accomplish any of those things before 2020. And his single-minded focus on the border wall – which has almost never attracted support from more than 45% of the country in any major poll during his presidency – illuminates how limited is his commitment to even pursuing such unity. “He is very comfortable reinforcing and energizing the people who are already with him at the expense of reaching beyond them to those who are not already on his side,” notes Ayres.
The first recent President who has never seen 50% approval
That has left Trump trying to govern from a narrower base of support than almost any of his predecessors. Gallup has consistently tested public attitudes toward presidents’ job performance since Harry Truman immediately World War II. Trump is the first president over that history never to reach 50% job approval in Gallup’s surveys at any point during his first two years; his Gallup approval has never exceeded 45% and stood at just 37% percent in its most recent poll in late January. In the new CNN poll, 40% of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance.
Both in the Gallup polling and others, Trump’s support and opposition has oscillated only in a very small range, especially compared with the more severe fluctuations common for almost all earlier presidents. “You can see all the other [presidents] have had highs and lows that were a considerably greater range of approval than he’s had,” says Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist. “His range, at least after his first couple weeks in office, has been between 37 and 43 percent. It hardly budges. Obviously it’s because he’s such a polarizing figure in a polarizing era.”
One clear message of the 2018 election is that the Republican Party, which has almost completely locked arms around Trump, is now largely hostage to these divergent attitudes about the President. During the mid-term, Republicans gained Senate seats in Missouri, North Dakota and Indiana, preponderantly white interior states where Trump is popular, but lost Senate seats in diverse, rapidly growing Arizona and Nevada. They were also annihilated in thriving white-collar suburban House districts from coast to coast where many view Trump as unfit for the job. Before the election, Republicans controlled over two-in-five of the House seats where the share of college graduates exceeds the national average. After the election, they hold just one-in-four.
Remarkable consistency
The new CNN poll, conducted by SSRS and released Monday, underscores the durability of the attitudes that produced those results. Across almost every major group, the share of voters who disapproved of Trump in the new survey closely (or even exactly) matched the share of voters who supported Democrats in last fall’s House elections, according to exit polls.
For instance, in the CNN poll 67% of young adults aged 18-34 said they disapproved of Trump’s job performance, the exact same percentage of them that voted Democratic for the House last fall. In the new survey, 77% of all non-whites disapproved of Trump; 76 % of them voted Democratic last fall. Among whites with at least a four year college degree 55 % disapproved of Trump after 53% voted Democratic last November; among non-college whites 38% disapproved of Trump and 37% voted Democratic. Fifty-one% of independents disapproved of Trump after 54 % voted Democratic last fall. And fully 94% of self-identified Democrats disapproved of Trump in the CNN survey again almost exactly matching the 95% who stuck with their party last fall.
These attitudes remained remarkably consistent in another poll released Monday by Monmouth University. That poll asked Americans whether they were now more inclined to vote for Trump or to prefer someone new in 2020. On that question, the key groups that drove the Democratic gains last November again divided almost exactly as they did in that election (and the new CNN poll on Trump’s performance): 77% of non-whites, 62% of young adults, 56% of college-educated whites, and 55% of independents all said they wanted someone new. In all, just 38% of those Monmouth surveyed said they are now inclined to back Trump for a second term, while 57% wanted someone new.
Other presidents have recovered to win a second term despite polls at about this point in their first term showing that most Americans are not inclined to re-elect them. But Trump has shown remarkably little ability, or even interest, in courting the potential majority coalition of young people, minorities and college-educated whites, especially women, who have solidified against him and the GOP throughout his presidency. More than perhaps any of his predecessors, he has shown himself comfortable operating without support from a majority of the public: indeed he has shown remarkably little interest in even seeking majority support.
Little public support for Trump’s wall
Nothing reveals that more than his focus on the border wall. It speaks volumes about his strategy that Trump responded to the GOP’s losses last November by precipitating a confrontation over a border wall that faces enormous opposition from all of the groups that powered the Democratic gains. In Quinnipiac University polling released last week, the border wall faced opposition from over seven-in-ten non-whites and young adults, nearly three-in-five independents, and 56 percent of college-educated whites. Given those sentiments, Trump’s wall might as well be a billboard advertising how little he cares about the groups outside his coalition.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has proven incapable of building support for the wall much beyond the limited base of Americans most hostile toward immigration overall. In new Gallup polling released Monday, the share of adults who supported building the wall (40%) was only slightly higher than the share that supported the dramatic step of deporting all undocumented immigrants “back to their home country” (37%). Further results provided by Gallup show that while almost exactly three-fourths of those who support deportation also back the wall, fully four-fifths of those who oppose deportation also oppose the wall. In other words, Trump has persuaded very few Americans to support the wall who don’t share the underlying skepticism toward immigration that he has radiated throughout his presidency.
Declaring a national emergency to fund construction of the wall, as Trump has suggested, faces even more lopsided opposition from the key groups that drove last November’s Democratic gains. In the CNN survey, that idea drew opposition from 81% of non-whites, 74% of young adults, 69% of college-educated whites and 63% of independents. Even half of non-college whites, and nearly one-third of Republicans, opposed a national emergency.
How Trump could win without majority support
Operating without majority support doesn’t mean that Trump can’t win a second term. In 2016, he squeezed out an Electoral College victory while narrowly losing the popular vote and facing even more lopsidedly negative verdicts on his personal attributes in the exit poll.
Like many Republicans, Ayres believes Democrats could choose a polarizing nominee “who is incapable of consolidating” the roughly 55% or slightly more of the country that has consistently expressed resistance to Trump. That could encourage some of the voters uneasy about Trump to splinter toward a third party candidate, such as Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who is openly pondering a bid. Even in that scenario, Ayres notes, Trump would face a very tight squeeze if he can’t expand his support beyond the roughly 45% of the vote he won in 2016 and GOP House candidates nationwide captured last fall. “The real question is whether you can draw to an inside straight twice in a row,” he says.
Over the longer term, the political questions Trump poses are even starker. Trump has steered the GOP toward a distinctive strategy of seeking to squeeze greater advantage from groups that are shrinking in society such as blue-collar and evangelical whites, while accepting preponderant resistance from groups that are growing: non-whites, college-educated whites, and the Millennial generation and younger. That strategy could prove reasonably resilient for Republicans in the near-term because the Electoral College and two-Senators-per-state rule magnify the influence of interior states least affected by demographic, cultural and economic change. But the inexorable shift of electoral influence from the preponderantly white baby boomers and older generations toward younger and much more racially diverse Millennials and post-Millennials shows why that approach could generate compounding risks over time. “I don’t think it’s a sustainable business model doubling down on a shrinking base and systematically alienating so many groups,” said Abramowitz.
Whatever Trump says tonight on infrastructure, health care or other issues is likely to be quickly subsumed by the continuing controversy over his demand for a wall, especially if he declares a national emergency, much less shuts down the government again, to fund it. For an hour or so from the podium of the House tonight, Trump may read the words of a president determined to persuade. But it’s his instinct to incite that has carved the tracks of his presidency so far – and appears much more likely to determine his fate in 2020.