Welcome to Poll Watch, our weekly look at polling data and survey research on the candidates, voters and issues that will shape the 2020 election.
With the United States now leading the world in confirmed coronavirus cases, Americans finally agree across party lines that the threat can’t be ignored.
More than nine in 10 voters nationwide are concerned about the spread of the virus, according to a Fox News poll released Thursday. And roughly that share of all Americans consider it a major threat to the economy, a Pew poll also released Thursday found.
In both cases, Democrats feel this way almost unanimously, and Republicans overwhelmingly agree. That bipartisan consensus applies to people’s impressions of their state governments, which have received broadly positive marks in various polls.
But as usual, it dries up wherever President Trump is concerned.
As he responds to the pandemic, Mr. Trump has seen a small uptick in his approval rating, which hit record highs in surveys released this week by Gallup (49 percent), Fox (48 percent), Monmouth University (46 percent) and Pew (45 percent).
Still, his approval rating remains stubbornly lodged below 50 percent across the board. That’s a barrier Mr. Trump has not been able to breach in most credible polls throughout his term, with Americans on both sides generally steadfast in their feelings about him.
He gets slightly better ratings for his handling of the coronavirus outbreak than for his job performance over all — but even on this, his approval is stuck around the 50-yard line. Three-quarters of Democratic voters give his response to the crisis negative marks, according to the Fox poll, while 86 percent of Republican voters say the opposite.
During times of international conflict or emergency, it is typical for a national leader’s approval ratings to experience a so-called rally effect. Yet while Mr. Trump has tried to frame himself as a “wartime president” during the pandemic, this catastrophe is different than most. It has not involved a foreign adversary or a single traumatic event, as wartime crises often do.
From the beginning, it has played out as an unfolding sequence of gradual strategic decisions aimed at what the president calls “the invisible enemy.” As a result, the way Mr. Trump is being graded for his response largely accords with how people already felt about his style of governing.
“People had opinions about this president very early in his administration, and they were strongly held opinions,” Alec Tyson, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, said in an interview. “It’s unlikely that people are just developing opinions about Trump now.”
To the degree that Mr. Trump is getting a bump in approval, the Pew poll found that it was coming especially from those who consider themselves political independents but lean Republican. His approval rating has leapt nine percentage points with these Americans since January, when the coronavirus was first detected in the United States. (Disapproval of Mr. Trump also softened slightly among Democrats, though to a lesser degree.)
This group could represent a crucial voting bloc for Mr. Trump in the November general election. As partisan Republicans have coalesced around him, he has struggled among some moderate and conservative voters who don’t feel an allegiance to the party. If former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. secures the Democratic nomination, he is certain to make an aggressive play for many of these voters.
In a sign of how prevalent the virus’s effects already are, more than one in 10 voters in the Fox poll said they knew someone who had been infected. And 43 percent said they or someone in their household had lost work because of the virus, including two-fifths of Republican voters.
Many Americans who might not typically pay close attention to politics may now be looking to Mr. Trump and Congress for a solution. Ninety-five percent of voters said they were following virus-related news at least somewhat closely, the Fox poll found. And as Congress pieced together an enormous $2 trillion stimulus package this week, voters’ approval of Congress reached a 10-year high. At just 31 percent, it’s still dismal — but over the past decade that number has more typically lingered in the teens.
The president’s daily news briefings during the crisis have averaged about 8.5 million viewers on cable news channels, on par with the season finale of “The Bachelor.” Those numbers don’t include the millions of people who are watching on broadcast stations and over the internet.
Mr. Trump is typically flanked at these briefings by government doctors and members of his administration, and his confident, freewheeling style may appeal to certain persuadable voters. But if the death toll skyrockets and the economy stays dormant, Mr. Trump’s hesitancy to take certain broad federal actions could expose him to criticism.
In the Fox poll, most voters said the federal government had done a poor or only fair job of responding quickly to the virus. And by a 19-point margin, voters said a stronger government response could have helped to quell the spread of the virus. Fifty-four percent of moderate voters said so.
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