It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402648.
It seems that the political tangents are just fine, as long as they are liberal-leaning. Futher, if you look at the entire universe of my comments, maybe 1% of them have anything to do with politics (and again they aren’t the rants that most accounts are allowed to go on without the threat of banishment - they usually have references and data to back them up). If you do ban my account, you would essentially be sending the message that it’s ok to discuss political matters here, but your view on those better be leftist or you’ll face a ban.
http://news.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-...?
Considering how laughably biased the media has been against Trump, relative to the exact opposite treatment that Obama had, he’s actually doing amazingly well in this regard. I think Trump has made a tremendous number of mistakes, but just going by the numbers, he seems to holding better than Obama ever did given the headwinds he faces.
My guess is Obama’s disapproval rating would have started off far higher too if Republicans were rioting in the streets and claimed cheating in the wake of his election. But Republicans didn’t do that, and took a considerably higher road than Democrats have done since Trump’s election. It has been shocking and terribly disappointing to see how poorly Democrats reacted to losing, and that poor sportsmanship is still playing out. It turns out that the “party of tolerance” is only tolerant of those in its own party.
No, they were not always in that range, and that's a huge range; the only time Trump has been anywhere near 40% is the initial honeymoon phase, where Obama was in the 20s.
> My guess is Obama’s disapproval rating would have started off far higher too if Republicans were rioting in the streets and claimed cheating in the wake of his election.
Yes, mass protests tend to be a symptom of widespread and strong opposition (another sign of widespread opposition is getting fewer votes than the other major party candidate; George W. Bush had the same problem, and started with the same poor numbers as Trump; unlike Trump, he managed to improve them to more typical early first term numbers quite quickly, even before the post-9/11 rally around the flag effect.)
They weren’t always there, but they certainly wound up there as his Presidency dragged on and things like Obamacare began to hit people’s wallets. Where it wound up is what matters, as people can’t disapprove of things that haven’t happened yet (except in Trump’s case, where some Democrats were calling for impeachment before he was inaugurated).
Yes, mass protests tend to be a symptom of widespread and strong opposition
The protests were driven by the media’s response, which were unlike anything that any candidate has faced before. The media was furious that they were unable to influence the election for Hillary, and then they realized that they could profit from the polarization. With enough negative media coverage, anything can sound like a big problem to those that allow the media to shape their opinions.
You're forgetting the birthirism, the claim that Obama was ineligible for the presidency because he was born abroad, complete with theatrical demands for his birth certificate.
Like the sitting US President:
* https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/18/politics/trump-obama-muslim-b...
* https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/10/opinions/why-trump-clings-to-...
* http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/time-donald-trump-talked-birt...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-b...
* https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-proud-birt...
Edit to add: You say birtherism as being fringe and rightly dismissed as nutjobs. My response is to show that it’s not fringe as it was supported by the current president. Part of the disapproval you’re trying to dismiss can be attributed to people frustrated with things like this.
There are legitimate reasons regardless of the hype you’re trying to use to dismiss the high disapproval ratings. There are well-known Republican/conservative voices that are speaking out against Trump as well. We’re also no longer in a period where people are necessarily comparing Trump and Clinton, choosing the lesser of two bad options.
Anyway, I’m out. Have a good $timeOfDay.
There are countless articles, videos, tweets (from The Donald himself) documenting it.
Instead you attack specific sources, in an attempt to discredit the facts.
- Allegedly Sidney Blumenthal urged a reporter to investigate where Obama was born, suggesting it was Kenya. This was denied by Blumenthal and appears to be a misread or exaggeration of an email Blumenthal wrote. (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election...)
- Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo about Obama's "lack of American roots" in reference to him having lived abroad, which the campaign never acted on. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/09/the-fro...)
- A volunteer coordinator in Iowa forward an email promoting birtherism and was fired for doing so. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/sep/25/...)
I have a hard time reconciling "very active in birtherism" (or promoting birtherism at all by the campaign, much less Clinton herself) with these incidents. If you've got other references, please share. (Though this is really far off the reservation with respect to the submission.)
Both were shitty candidates, Trump was just the shittiest of the two.
His approval reasons would be in the dumps, media influence or not.
You're making a pretty wild assertion, that Trump's and Obama's approval ratings would be equal if it wasn't for media influence. How do you propose normalizing that?
How would you do that? Please give an example that doesn't entail making up numbers from subjective whole cloth.
That's quite the objective statement statement you have there.
How would you do that? Please give an example that doesn't entail making up numbers from subjective whole cloth.
It would be relatively simple, though it would involve some data collection. Count the number of positive and negative stories published at various time frames, and come out with a ratio. Then figure out the correlation between that ratio and approval/disapproval ratings at that time. Then you'd multiply Obama's disapproval number by the delta between his positive/negative ratio and Trump's (and probably include some multiplier that would be less than 1 based on how strong the correlation turns out to be) to show what Obama's disapproval numbers would be if he had suffered the same media bias as Trump.
That's off the top of my head, but the process would be fairly close to that. Nobody in the liberal media will do it, but the whole point is that comparing Obama's disapproval numbers to Trump's is not an apples-to-apples comparison because of the extraordinary bias of the media against Trump.
I feel very confident making that statement. Considering his personal and professional conduct, his backpedaling on earlier statements, his absolutely disastrously inept attempts at diplomacy and a whole host of other issues, it is accurate to say that he is absolutely not a person you would want to have any sort of relationship with, what so ever.
>"It would be relatively simple"
You're arguing from a biased starting point. You're assuming that media coverage is the most important factor in a president's popularity rating, not his actual actions and fuckups.
>"show what Obama's disapproval numbers would be if he had suffered the same media bias as Trump."
>"the whole point is that comparing Obama's disapproval numbers to Trump's is not an apples-to-apples comparison because of the extraordinary bias of the media against Trump."
You're ignoring the massive backlash, smear campaigns and outright hate spewed by the right-wing media during Obama's presidency. I'm not sure if you've just forgotten it, or if you're willfully ignoring it, but it was everywhere, endless pandering to birtherism, outright racism, doomsay prophecies that he would turn the US into a socialism/communist hellhole, that he would take everyone's guns, put all white people into camps, the whole spiel.
In contrast, most of the coverage of Trump is simply detaling what new stupid thing he did.
But if it's so simple, why haven't you done it yet?
I also want to point out that it's pretty facile to assert that if Republicans had disapproved of Obama more strongly, he would have been more strongly disapproved of.
I think even the most hardcore Democrat would agree that the vast majority of media outlets are liberal leaning. So their disapproval has a stronger effect on their opposition simply because they are louder and more people listen to them.
No, it's not. From the source cited upthread, here's what other Presidents had at the same point in their Presidency as Trump's current 53.6% disapproval:
Obama: 45.3% Bush 43: 17.6% Clinton: 40.2% Bush 41: 15.3% Reagan: 45.0% Carter: 34.5% Ford: 38.6% Nixon: 31.4% Johnson: 15.1% Kennedy: 12.0% Eisenhower: 22.2% Truman: 45.1%
That’s either scary or good, depending on your political leanings I suppose.
Obama got to 55+% disapproval rating twice, in two single polls (3 Dec 2013 and 2 Aug 2014). His yearly average disapproval ratings were 36, 47, 47, 48, 52, 50, 46%.
Trump has spent roughly 30% of his time above 55%. RCP doesn't have yearly rates up, but it's pretty clear they are much worse than Obamas.
factoring in the unprecedented liberal media headwinds faces by Trump
It seems to me the only thing keeping any kind of approval at all for Trump is his attacks on the media. It seems to me that fighting with the media is the only thing keeping him below 60% disapproval.
That's true in the sense that it's true that Nixon's outgoing numbers were pretty good given the time of the media coverage at the time; there's not a lot of evidence, though, that measuring support relative to media coverage produces any kind of useful information.
There are studies proving that the media does in fact have an effect on overall opinion. So if you believe those studies, then you have to also believe that the overwhelmingly negative media attention received by Trump would have an effect on his disapproval ratings.
So it isn't Trump's "disapproval" ratings that are new for any President, it's the level of hatred that the press has for Trump that is new and allows for their spin on everything he does to "...be made alarming" as you put it. Look no further than HuffPo for your ridiculous daily press alarm. Obama was right in the same range in terms of disapproval, you just heard less about it because he was very popular among the types of people that tend to become reporters.
[1] http://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidential...