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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

The guy still has like ~35% approval ratings according to every poll there is, and that’s after weekly displays of outright corruption from him and his family, and “winning” the same war dozens of times already with no end in sight. The number hardly even budged YTD.

You’re telling me that this country is capable of learning?

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You say it like a 35% approval rating is a good thing. It is not.

That a third or more still support him seems crazy to me.

But it's an approval rating. Of the people surveyed. Who chose to reply.

A lot of extrapolations are made out of the 10 people who responded.

You do not believe in statistics as a discipline?

I don't think most polling qualifies as statistics, without providing info like selection criteria or number of respondents. Otherwise we'll walk right into another situation like when Trump won an election while polling in near last place.

Or maybe I want something a little more significant than "we asked around the newsroom, and 35% of fox news reporters approve of the current administration". Cool, thanks, but that's not helpful or even a useful datapoint.

> I want something a little more significant than "we asked around the newsroom, and 35% of fox news reporters approve of the current administration". Cool, thanks, but that's not helpful or even a useful datapoint.

The state of the art (which confirms this ~35% approval number) is far more rigorous than that.

Start with a meta-review of historical accuracy and transparency, eg: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti...

Details on methodology and sample size can be Googled, eg: https://poll.qu.edu/methodology/ , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/24/ev... , https://www.google.com/search?q=Marquette+University+Law+Sch..., etc.

Sample size is less important than you might think, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence...

Yeah but you can get 30% of people to support almost anything once you get them hooked. Some people are always going to be dumb or too stubborn to ever admit they were wrong.

Even 10% would concern me.

Still way too high.

35% of US voters is all you need to be President and control the Senate, effectively controlling the US government.

We'll see if that's true come the midterms. I have doubts Republicans can keep enough seats with that sort of approval, given it's much worse with independents, and the Republican candidates seem to be a lot weaker than their Democratic opponents in a number of key races, like Texas. Only thing I'm less sure of is the huge amount of Super PAC money Republicans have to spend on tight races.

no they can't. After J6, it was over. America did nothing. the coddling of white fragility is too strong.

Well, he did deliver on his promise of $1.99 gas.

He didn't say that it would be $1.99/liter.

It is lowest in history in this point of presidency apart from Nixon, who resigned at this point. That 30-35% is the floor, which won’t budge, likely because the hard core Maga Republicans have nowhere to go in US two-party system - which would be not just a surrender of long-held political beliefs, but a complete social death as well. This does not mean that the core Maga is very happy either, but they hope the movement continues after Trump so they can finally get the full Christian Nationalist Fascism they so desire.

I doubt that is going to happen. Trump is going keep the strings behind the party, fucking everybody hard, until finally he dies or otherwise implodes. What is left of American democracy when that happens is a whole another thing.

If you wanted a Russian puppet in the oval office, it would do exactly what Epstein's BFF Donald is doing. There are zero reasons to support anything Putin is doing (read: daily war crimes), however, the destruction from within in the US and EU is executed amazingly well.

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