Trump’s poll standing slips as doubts rise over his ability to get things done

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s standing with the American public, never particularly robust, has taken another hit in the past couple of weeks, with signs of weakness appearing among Republican voters.

The renewed decline comes after a few months of relative stability that followed a drop in early May. The latest decline coincides – as the previous one did – with a period in which the administration’s highly unpopular health care plans dominated news coverage.

The latest drop is not huge. It represents a slow leak, rather than a blowout. But the decline is consistent, showing up in a half-dozen recent surveys from a range of nonpartisan polling organizations.

Fewer than 4 in 10 Americans now approve of Trump’s performance in office, the surveys indicate, while nearly 6 in 10 have a negative opinion.

More troubling for the White House than the size of the drop is the nature of who has begun souring on Trump.

In polls by SurveyMonkey, for example, which uses very large samples that allow for analysis of subgroups, moderate Republicans have noticeably started to leave the fold. In February, about 80 percent of them said they supported Trump; by this past week, that support had fallen to 67 percent.

At the same time, the share of people who say Trump “can get things done” has dropped by about 10 points since early March. Only 28 percent of people in the most recent SurveyMonkey poll said he can. Because that figure is smaller than Trump’s overall job approval, it indicates that even some of Trump’s supporters have begun to doubt his effectiveness.

Similarly, only 19 percent now say that “keeps his promises” applies to Trump, a big drop from the 35 percent who said so early in the spring.

In polling by YouGov, about one-third of Americans said Trump “understands important issues in detail,” while about half said he does not. That’s slightly below the share who approved of his performance, 37 percent, compared with 54 percent who disapproved.

And in a poll released this week by Quinnipiac University, the public’s view of Trump had soured on a range of personal characteristics. Only a quarter of those polled said he was “level headed,” for example, and only 26 percent said they were “proud” to have him as president.

Those ratings were below Trump’s job approval – just 33 percent in the Quinnipiac survey, which was the worst for him of the recent polls. So as with the other surveys, the comparison suggests that a number of people approve of Trump’s overall performance even as they take a negative view of his personal traits.

Finally, the polls show that the share of voters who say they “strongly” approve of Trump’s performance has continued to decline. An increasing number of Republican voters has shifted from offering him strong approval to offering a more tepid level of support.

The decline in strong approval and the doubts about Trump’s personal characteristics all suggest the potential for further weakening of Trump’s support if his recent troubles continue.