Two polls taken right after President Trump's first State of the Union address Tuesday night found that a majority of viewers had a positive reaction to the speech. In a CBS News poll, 75 percent of respondents approved of Trump's speech while 25 percent disapproved, while CNN's poll found that 48 percent had a "very positive" impression of the speech, 22 percent had a "somewhat positive" reaction, and 29 percent had a negative response. As with every State of the Union address, the president's supporters watched the speech in disproportionately high numbers relative to the U.S. electorate as a whole.
In the CBS News poll, for example, 52 percent of the 1,178 people surveyed said they were Trump supporters, 32 percent identified as Trump opponents, and 16 percent said they were something in between. Trump should be pleased that 70 percent of viewers had at least a somewhat positive reaction to his speech, CNN's David Chalian said, but that's still the lowest net approval rating for a State of the Union address since CNN started asking in 1998. Former President Barack Obama, who also got 48 percent strong approval for his first State of the Union speech, nevertheless scored a 78 percent net positive score.
The CBS News poll has a margin of error of ±3.1 percentage points, while CNN's poll, conducted by SSRS among 549 viewers, has a margin of sampling error of ±4.2 percentage points.
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