Please stop treating Trump's daily approval ratings like the temperature

[DonViejo]

By Philip Bump May 15 at 4:03 PM

I spend a lot of time looking at political Twitter because I am a damaged human being whose undiagnosed masochism is clearly burbling just beneath the surface. In doing so, I will see with some regularity a tweet talking about how the new Gallup daily job approval rating has Trump up X percent or down Y percent and how that means that the thing he did or didn’t do yesterday or the day prior is dooming or buoying his presidency. That’s sort of an exaggeration, but not much. It’s tracked the way a normal person might eyeball the temperature, particularly on Twitter where the community rumbles through about 19 obsessions a day.

It’s also very misleading.

Here’s what Trump’s daily approval rating looks like.

A lot of volatility, certainly! But let’s step away from Gallup for a second.

During the campaign, RealClearPolitics’s Sean Trende raised a point that’s related. He was lamenting that fewer national polls meant that there was necessarily more daily volatility. Why? Because polling averages tend to smooth out fluctuations based on margins of error. In Gallup’s daily poll (actually itself an average of the past three days of responses), the margin of error is plus or minus 3 points. So it looks like this:

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/05/15/please-stop-treating-trumps-daily-approval-ratings-like-the-temperature/?utm_term=.91bcec85251f&wpisrc=nl_politics&wpmm=1

[rock]

1. You're right

Besides, that ~40% just does not pay any attention to what is going on (they certainly don't understand what's going on)!