Donald Trump is historically unpopular because everyone hates him except old white men

Following up on Erik’s post regarding the new CNN poll, a few notes on just how unpopular Donald Trump is with the American public:

(1) His 37% approval rating in the most recent Gallup poll is by far the lowest such rating at this point in any president’s tenure, going back to the beginning of the Gallup poll in the 1940s.  The next lowest number, at 47%, belonged to Reagan, but at that point in Reagan’s presidency the US was in the middle of the most severe recession the nation suffered between 1958 and 2008.  By contrast, at this moment the US is in what is now the second-longest economic expansion in the nation’s history. (If we get to July without a recession it will be the longest. ETA: actually it would take until July of next year.).  For a president to have anything like Trump’s approval ratings in anything like the present economic conditions is completely unprecedented.  If the country goes into a recession any time before November — and again we are in the second-longest stretch without a recession in US history — the GOP is likely to get destroyed at the polls.

Unless we suddenly discover Mexico has weapons of mass destruction or something.  (kidding/not kidding).

(2) The subcategories in the CNN poll are something to behold.  Trump’s approval rating is 29% among women, 23% among non-whites (don’t know if this includes Hispanics, the majority of which classify ourselves as white), and 22% of Americans under 35.  You don’t need to be real good at math to figure out that the only large demographic categories in which Trump isn’t massively unpopular are old white men and Republicans, which of course are increasingly the same thing.

(3) The gap between the general unpopularity of Republicans among Americans, and their continued success at winning elections, is a tribute to the power of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of Our Holy and Sacred Constitution, gerrymandering, voter suppression efforts, class effects on voting participation, and a media environment in which it is still a requirement to pretend that the US still has two sane major political parties.