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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it always the case that the President has "disapproval" ratings around 50% though? Half the country tends to like the person they voted for, and half the country has sour grapes because their side lost. Obama's disapproval ratings also hovered above 50% at several points in his Presidency [1].

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...

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Could you please not take HN threads on partisan political tangents? I'm not sure exactly at which point we went off the rails here but your account appears to have done the largest part.

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.

The notion that my data-based response to someone else’s political comment is a “political battle” is absurd. Now you’re threatening to ban my account because I brought up a fact that happens to disagree with an incredibly liberal-skewed comment? There are many other accounts that consistently engage in the political discussions on this site, but it’s odd that I haven’t seen public threats to ban those. I’ve seen some downright hostile political comments from many accounts - but again I’ve only seen 1 publicly posted ban threat.

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.

Trump's disapproval ratings are very different to the usual ratings at the start of a presidency, which tend to be higher, and Obama's average rating was higher than Trump's highest ever rating (even Obama's lowest ratings are about the same as that). It is just nonsense to pretend that Trump's ratings are "right in the same range" as Obama.

http://news.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-...?

Were Obama’s disapproval ratings not always in the 40-55% range, which are right where Trump’s are? The data suggests they were.

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.

> Were Obama’s disapproval ratings not always in the 40-55% range, which are right where Trump’s are?

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.)

No, they were not always in that range, and that's a huge range

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.

Here's a graph for disapproval ratings for both of them. See for yourself: https://i.imgur.com/5dk3lWg.png

> claimed cheating in the wake of his election

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.

That was a relatively small number of extreme right wingers, and they were quickly branded by the media as nutjobs (and rightly so, as long as Obama had his papers in order). That movement wasn’t mainstream, unlike the Trump cheating/collusion claims.

You realize that movement included Donald Trump, right?

Don’t take my assessment of the numbers as a defense of Trump. I didn’t vote for him or Hillary, and I think he is both way off in the weeds on many issues and making us look bad on the world stage. But that doesn’t mean that we should go painting things as being worse than they are, embracing hypocrisy, or misinterpreting facts like the media does.

We also shouldn't go making up facts in order to paint Trump's approval ratings as better than they are.

And I’m not. But I think even you would agree that the overwhelmingly negative press coverage - almost all of it opinion based - has some effect on the disapproval ratings. 50% was going to be built in from the start. Somebody should do the math to figure out the correlation between the ratio of positive to negative press stories and the disapproval ratings for both Trump and Obama. I think you’d find that if you normalize that ratio for both of these guys, Trump actually wins that race.

Trump is objectively a terrible person and an even worse politician.

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.

Trump is objectively a terrible person and an even worse politician.

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.

>"That's quite the objective statement statement you have there."

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?

"Even" me? You're the one who called Trump an extreme right-wing nutjob.

> "a relatively small number of extreme right wingers"

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...

Don’t bother posting HuffPo links as references. I hope nobody is taking anything they read there as fact these days. If they are, we are in bigger trouble as a country than I thought. I’d say the politics section of CNN falls in the same category. With regard to the rest of your comment...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16714508

I didn’t reference them for the editorial or analysis: None of these are sources I generally read but they were among the top that came up when searching. Take a look at the quotes in the pieces. If you dispute them as inaccurate or out of context, please do point them out.

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.

Do you deny that Trump was extremely active in birtherism and claiming Obama wasn't eligible for the position as president?

There are countless articles, videos, tweets (from The Donald himself) documenting it.

Instead you attack specific sources, in an attempt to discredit the facts.

Again, I’m not defending Trump. Never have. But that doesn’t mean we should purposely misinterpret hard data to try to make him look worse than he already makes himself look.

He was certainly very active in birtherism but so was Hillary when she ran against Obama which is what people are forgetting about :)

"But but but HILLARY!" is not a valid argument.

Both were shitty candidates, Trump was just the shittiest of the two.

Would you elaborate what you mean by "but so was Hillary"? I'm aware of three incidents that could seen as related:

- 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.)

The data says that Trump's disapproval ratings are already averaging over 50, which is unusual, and so far his highest disapproval rating has been 58%. The exact range for Trump so far has been 44-58, whereas for Obama's presidency his range was 19-56. Only the most partisan analysis can pretend that those look the same. At this point in his presidency, Obama was at his highest disapproval level so far, and it was 46% - Trump hasn't seen disapproval that low since January 2017. (You may not be aware that disapproval ratings are not actually calculated as 100-approval). Obama never hit the net disapproval levels that Trump is at.

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 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.

You really need to stop guessing at reality and start actually learning about it https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/02/trump-...

> Isn't it always the case that the President has "disapproval" ratings around 50% though?

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%

Still, factoring in the unprecedented liberal media headwinds faces by Trump, I’d say his numbers are amazingly good and still within the range of Obama’s after Obamacare began hitting people’s wallets.

That’s either scary or good, depending on your political leanings I suppose.

> Still, factoring in the unprecedented liberal media headwinds faces by Trump, I’d say his numbers are amazingly good

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'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.

You keep saying this, but it's just not true.

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.

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