Initial Job Approval Ratings Of US Presidents [CHART]

Initial Approval Ratings Of US Presidents

On the day he took the oath of office, Gallup’s tracker showed that only 45% of the American public said that they approved of the job Trump was doing, with an equal number disapproving. Since then, his approval has declined slightly, and his disapproval has risen to historically high levels.

To put these figures in context, George W. Bush, who also won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, came into office with a 57% approval rating. It’s more typical for presidents to start with an approval rating over 60%, as Obama, Carter, and Eisenhower did, even if no one expects a modern president to start over 70%, as Johnson, Ford, and Kennedy did. What all of these presidents have in common is that they only retained their high approval ratings for about three months — what presidency scholars call “the honeymoon period,” before they began to dip significantly. These drops aren’t inevitable — national crises can cause people to rally around the president, as they did after Reagan was shot — but they’re the general rule. So if Trump’s approval numbers are middling-to-poor now, they’re likely to get worse soon. Read the rest at Harvard Business Review.