Americans set the expectations bar low for President Donald Trump's tenure and, a year after his election, President Trump has smashed those expectations — to the down side — with a majority saying he has accomplished "little/nothing," according to The Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday.
With an approval rating of a mere 37 percent, 59 percent of American's disapprove of the way President Trump is handling his job, 43 percent saying he has accomplished "little or nothing," and 22 percent saying "not very much," according to the poll.
Comparing the latest results to the poll's modest expectations from President Trump's inauguration, the support has waned significantly. After 61 percent expected he would be "excellent" or do a "good job" on handling the economy, just 44 percent agree after the first nine months of his presidency. There was also a sharp decline in confidence in dealing with terrorism, dropping from 56 percent to just 43 percent.
The economy polling results are surprising, considering the stock market is at record highs, unemployment reached a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, and he has hit on back-to-back quarters of producing 3 percent growth — all without tax reform.
President Trump has long waged a campaign to discredit the accuracy of polling results, which did project a major miss on predicting the election winner last year. Even a former Hillary Clinton pollster finds that polls underrate President Trump's approval, as they did in the election.
"The polls that failed to detect the full strength of President Trump on Election Day continue to underestimate the president's support for the job he is doing, paying way too much attention to the Twitter wars and ignoring the public support for many of the actions he is undertaking," Mark Penn wrote in The Hill last month.
Regardless, the poor presidential approval ratings mark the lowest for the president in the modern era (since 1953), according to The Washington Post.
The survey was conducted Oct. 29-Nov. 1 via phone calls to 1,005 random adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.