18 February 2019 — 1743 mst
President Trump’s net approval rating in Montana
remains above water (but only by a nose)
Preface. Happy Washington’s Birthday, everyone. One of our nation’s most enduring beliefs is that after six-year-old George chopped down his father’s cherry tree, he forthrightly confessed to his misdeed, telling his father “I cannot tell a lie.” It’s a wonderful story, and probably a myth concocted by Parson Mason Locke Weems as a character building story with considerable moral clout. Weems did not address the wisdom of giving a six-year-old a hatchet.
The subject of my post today, President Donald Trump, undoubtedly would have chopped down his father’s cherry tree, then shamelessly asserted that the hatchet was wielded by Mexicans who were in our nation illegally, having crossed the border in the Sonoran Desert smuggling drugs. Unlike Washington, Trump can tell a lie, does tell lies, and wouldn’t know the truth if it shook him by the hand. One can only wonder how Pastor Weems, were he alive today, would try to spin a morality tale about our Mendacitor in Chief, whose winning the Presidency proves that not being able to tell the truth doesn’t prevent a man from succeeding in life.
Mendacity still has a positive net approval rating in Montana
Every month, Morning Consult publishes Tracking Trump, a state-by-state report on Trump’s approval, disapproval, and net approval ratings. Every day, FiveThirtyEight publishes Trump’s nationwide mean approval and disapproval ratings. In the graph below, I’ve combined Morning Consult’s data for Montana with FiveThirtyEight’s data for the nation.
By my count, Trump still has a positive net approval rating in 17 states, a zero net approval rating in two states (Nebraska and Texas), and a negative net approval rating in the other 31 states plus the District of Columbia. His highest net approval ratings are found in Alabama, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Trump’s national net approval has been underwater his entire presidency, with his approval rating generally holding in the 40–45 percent range. That’s both a red flag for his prospects for re-election, and evidence that his base of hardcore supporters has not crumbled. Even if he screwed the pooch in Times Square at high noon his hardcore base probably would applaud his audacity and in-your-face effrontery instead of crumbling out of revulsion for his crassness.
What accounts for Trump’s continued popularity in Montana? As much as anything else, I think much of his approval is an expression of disapproval of the national Democratic Party’s increasing disdain for rural America and the white working class that Hillary cruelly and cavalierly — and wrongly — dismissed as deplorable racists and homophobes.
There’s not much that Montana’s Democratic Party can do to alter the perception that the national Democratic Party doesn’t care that much about Montana, although abjuring identity politics in Montana might mitigate some of the damage the national party is doing in rural America.
For example, Sen. Sherrod Brown, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, or Sen. Jeff Merkely, or former Louisiana Lt. Gov. and Mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, would be better fits than Kyrsten Sinema as the keynote speaker for the MDP’s upcoming Mansfield-Metcalf Dinner (tickets start at $70; this is not a bean feed that Widow Murphy, who works the phones for Democrats and ekes by on triple-digit Social Security, can easily afford).
I’ll note parenthetically that Sinema’s penchant for exotic costumes, which stretch the envelope for respectable attire for U.S. Senators, has not been received well by some in the conservative commentariat; here's an example from the Pacific Pundit). I’m giving her a one-time pass for her swearing-in outfit because it obviously discomfited Vice President Mike Pence, who informally serves as his President’s Prig-in-Chief, and whose behavior invited Sinema’s sartorial statement.