19 September 2019 — 2248 mdt
A glut of graphs
A majority of Montanans still approve of
President Trump’s handling of his job
Donald Trump won 56.5 percent of the 2016 presidential vote cast in Montana, 61.1 percent of the two-party vote, and carried 47 of Montana’s 56 counties (graph).
Steve Bullock won 50.3 percent of the 2016 gubernatorial vote, 52.0 percent of the two-party vote, and carried 13 counties.
Jon Tester won 50.3 percent of the 2018 senatorial vote, 51.8 percent of the two-party vote, and carried 13 counties.
Although President Trump’s job approval rating is underwater, and in the low 40-percents, nationally, it remains above water and above 50 percent in Montana. And in both cases, the month-to-month variation is low, indicating that his core constituency is not shrinking. Voters who chose him in 2016 still like him.
But more Montanans approve of Gov. Steve Bullock than of Donald Trump (graph).
Two polling firm, Civiqs and Morning Consult, track Trump’s approval among registered voters on a state-by-state basis, publishing the results online. FiveThirtyEight publishes a national average of tracking polls. These are my sources for the data displayed in the graphs below. Based on the pollsters’ documentation of their methodologies, I've assumed a sampling margin of error of three percent.
Civiqs and Morning Consult appear to have modified their polling methods in the fall of 2017. Note the crossover in the graph below. Since then, the difference between the polls has held fairly steady, with Civiqs reporting the higher approval numbers. Therefore, I’ve plotted an average of the monthly results. I suggest treating the pre-crossover results with caution, and resisting the temptation to perform a bookend-to-bookend comparison.
I’ve plotted both the approval ratings, and the net approval rating (approve minus disapprove), and in a number of different ways.
Following the graphs: analysis.
Next, the same numbers, but with error bars and a 0–100 percent scale on the y-axis.
Next, net approval.
Now, the average of the Civiqs and Morning Consult polls.
The same numbers, but with error bars.
Another way of displaying the distribution of the monthly approval values for Montana.
To illustrate the crossover, I subtracted Morning Consult’s numbers from Civiqs’ and plotted the results as a column graph. The point of crossover is clear.
Morning Consult also publishes online quarterly approval ratings for governors and senators. Here are the numbers for Sens. Tester and Daines, Gov. Bullock, and President Trump.
Now, just Trump and Bullock.
I decided to plot Bullock’s quarterly approval ratings as a function of Trump’s.
Is this a spurious correlation, or is it the result of what Bullock did to attract enough Republican voters to win the election?
Tester and Trump.
The approval ratings of Tester and Trump appear to be independent of each other.
Daines and Trump.
Daines as a function of Trump. As expected, their approval ratings tend to rise and fall together, although Daines’ ratings vary more than Trump’s.
Many Democrats want Bullock to fold his presidential tent and hit the senatorial trail in Montana, believing he can beat Daines. And indeed, his approval ratings are higher than Daines’. But approval ratings for different jobs are not an apples to apples comparison, nor is a comparison of approval ratings the equivalent of a poll testing the match-up of the men for an election. Bullock, incidentally, says he’s not running for the senate. He could change his mind, but I doubt he will.
Plotting Daines’ approval as a function of Trump’s produces an interesting result.
Bullock and Tester.
Bullock’s approval rating may be more independent of Tester’s than of Daines’. Whether it is meaningfully so is a different question.
Tester and Daines.
Are Tester’s and Daines’ approval ratings linked to any extent? Not to any statistically meaningful extent.
How do the approval ratings for Tester and Daines compare to the approval ratings of their colleagues in the senate?
Analysis
Are Trump’s approval ratings reasonable? One test is whether they’re in rough agreement with his percentage of the presidential vote cast in 2016.
The approval ratings are consistent with Trump’s percentage of the votes cast for president, and thus are reasonable. Reinforcing that conclusion are the percentages of the votes that Montanans cast for Mitt Romney and John McCain, the Republican candidates in 2012 and 2008 respectively. Romney’s numbers are slightly higher than those of McCain, who was running in a banner year for statewide Democrats in Montana.
Although the ratings of approval are for how Trump is doing his job, I suspect they also reflect approval for who he his and how he comports himself.
Trump dominated Montana, carrying 47 of 56 counties.
Trump’s continued positive net approval in Montana augurs well for Steve Daines. As Ed Kilgore noted at the Daily Intelligencer earlier this year:
In the last presidential election year, split-ticket voting in Senate races basically vanished. That’s right: In 2016, all 34 races were won by the party that won the state in question in the presidential contest. That’s never happened before.
Daines’ approval ratings have varied, dipping into the low forties last year, but have rebounded to 50 percent. As long as he doesn’t make a disastrous mistake, such as selling crystal meth to an undercover cop in broad daylight in Billings, or being arrested for smuggling Arabic speaking thugs dressed like Yasser Arafat across the Arizona border, he’ll probably win re-election if Trump carries Montana next year. He might even be re-elected in spite of doing such things if Trump carries Montana by a wide enough margin.