Trump's approval rating is abysmally low in swing districts, poll finds

Trump.
(Image credit: Adam Bettcher / Getty Images)

There's trouble in swing country for President Trump.

Poll results released on Wednesday by Monmouth University show that voters in swing districts — where the margin between Trump and his 2016 presidential election opponent Hillary Clinton was less than 10 percentage points — actually disapprove of Trump's performance in the Oval Office at higher rates than voters in districts who supported Clinton by more than 10 percentage points.

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The results appear to back up the Trump re-election campaign team's plan to focus heavily in areas like Michigan and Wisconsin, which were sites of some of the smallest gaps in the 2016 contest. Trump eked out surprising victories in both states.

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However, the Monmouth poll doesn't provide polling data from individual districts. That 31 percent approval rating is the aggregate of every district where the race was decided by less than 10 percentage points, some of which Clinton won. The poll also does not stipulate whether the voters who disapprove of Trump also refuse to vote for him in 2020 — the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Still, the results illustrate Trump's potential vulnerability.

The poll was conducted via telephone April 11-15, interviewing 801 U.S. adults. The total margin of error is 3.5 percentage points, though the margin of error in swing counties is 7.8 percentage points. See more results at Monmouth.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.