HOW TO MEASURE TRUMP’S 100 DAYS? Tomorrow marks the end of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. Beginning on Day 90 or so, we’ve seen a slew of polls and pronouncements delivering judgment on the president’s performance. “HISTORICALLY UNPOPULAR,” read one headline on the Drudge Report. “LOWEST 100-DAY SCORE IN 80 YEARS!” read another. And another: “39% APPROVAL.”
The New York Post headline put it this way: “President Trump battered by brutal polls that show his approval sinking — including one revealing the lowest ratings since World War II.” Go down the list — a New York Times poll had Trump’s job approval at 42%; a CBS News poll had the number at 45%; a Rasmussen poll had Trump at 47%; an Economist-YouGov poll had Trump at 44%; and a Fox News poll had Trump at 44%.
That’s not great, but where did they get the “lowest ratings since World War II” thing? That came from a Washington Post poll, which, like some others, found Trump at 42% approval among registered voters. But the Washington Post also released a finding showing Trump at 39% among all adults, including those who don’t care enough to vote even in hotly contested elections.
Thirty-nine percent! That’s the headline! To reach this result, the Washington Post pollsters surveyed 848 people who said they voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, and then 842 people who said they voted for Trump, and then 729 people who said they did not vote. Now, it seems odd to survey more people who voted for Harris than Trump, because you might recall that Trump received more votes than Harris. Presumably, the Washington Post then adjusted the totals to reflect the actual 2024 results. But then there is turnout — in 2024, it was 64%, the second-highest of any presidential election ever. People who did not vote, or even register to vote, really did not give a damn about the election. The Washington Post included a lot of them in the 39% mark that has gotten the commentators so excited.
But put aside arguments over specific polls. There’s no doubt that Trump’s job approval number has declined over the first 100 days. Back in January, after a week in office, Trump’s approval stood at 50.5% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Now, it’s at 45.3% in the same average, for a decline of about 5 points.
That is a bigger decline than most, but it’s also fair to say Trump’s has been a bigger 100 days than most. And you should also factor in that Trump has done some genuinely controversial things in that period and that media coverage of his presidency so far has been relentlessly negative and, in many cases, hostile. Indeed, one time-honored media practice, honed to perfection with Trump, is to bury a political figure in negative coverage and then take a poll finding — surprise! — that his job approval has fallen.
Maybe it would be a good idea to step aside from all that. Are there any other measures of Trump’s performance than job approval numbers? One good place to look is what pollsters call the right-track-wrong-track question. Basically, it is, do you think the country is heading in the right direction today, or is it headed in the wrong direction?
If you look at the RealClearPolitics average of the direction-of-the-country question for the last year, you’ll see that it looks like a funnel. During the final months of Joe Biden’s presidency, between 65% and 70% of poll respondents said the country was going in the wrong direction, and between 25% and 30% said the country was going in the right direction.
Then, when Trump took office, the funnel dramatically narrowed. The number of people who said the country is going in the wrong direction dropped to about 50%, while the number who said it was going in the right direction shot up to about 40%. Right now, the RealClearPolitics average numbers are 51.1% wrong direction and 40.0% right direction.
What does that mean? First of all, remember that a majority of the country almost always says the country is going in the wrong direction. That’s just the way it is. So when even 40% say it is going in the right direction, that’s pretty good. “If that doesn’t seem like a lot, the last time it cracked 40%, you’ve got to go back to 2012,” MSNBC analyst Steve Kornacki said in March, when an NBC poll showed 44% saying the country was going in the right direction.
There are a few more results that suggest where things stand with voters. For all its problems, the Washington Post poll did ask some good questions, among them: “Overall, who do you trust to do a better job handling the country’s main problems — Trump or the Democrats in Congress?” Among registered voters, 40% said Trump, while 32% said Democrats in Congress. The Washington Post also asked, “Do you think Trump is in touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today, or is he out of touch?” Again among registered voters, 42% said Trump was in touch. When the Washington Post asked the same question about the Democratic Party, 29% said Democrats were in touch. (The number for the Republican Party was 38%.)
So, where do things stand? Obviously, Trump is less popular now than he was 100 days ago. The biggest factor in that is his still-evolving tariff policy, which has created a lot of — that dread word — uncertainty across the economic spectrum. The stock market has reacted badly, almost hysterically, so the 60-plus percent of Americans who own stocks in some form are not happy with that. Much of the rest of tariff mania is prospective — that is, it is angst over changes that are predicted to come if Trump does A, or does B, or does C. It hasn’t actually happened yet — prices haven’t shot up and the shelves aren’t empty — but all the talk has put people in a bad mood.
Finally, in one specific area, Trump has been a smashing success, and that is in stopping the massive flow of illegal border crossers into the United States. Poll after poll in the run-up to the 2024 election showed that the border disaster was among the top two or three issues of the campaign. And just like that, Trump fixed the problem. Illegal crossings have now virtually disappeared. In his March 4 address to Congress, Trump said, “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. ‘We must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.” When he said that, he was telling the truth.
Has any other president solved one of the nation’s top problems, as identified by voters in the campaign, in literally his first weeks in office? If it has happened, it’s pretty rare.
So, go back to the headlines — “HISTORICALLY UNPOPULAR,” “LOWEST 100-DAY SCORE IN 80 YEARS!,” “39% APPROVAL.” Do they accurately convey Trump’s presidency so far? Let’s just say they don’t tell the whole story.