Keller: Can President Trump brush off his tanking poll numbers?
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
Across the political spectrum, the polls agree that President Trump's job approval has taken a hit lately.
But with the president lashing out at those numbers after a well-known conservative commentator drew attention to them, you wonder if Mr. Trump can afford to brush them off.
What do the latest polls say?
"I think we had the greatest hundred days in the history of our country for an administration," the president said recently. But that's not what the wave of 100-day polls shows. The Real Clear Politics website average shows Trump's popular border security crackdown weighed down by concern over other immigration moves and his foreign policy and management of the economy and inflation sagging well underwater, a red flag for Republican commentator Karl Rove.
"There's a lot of concern about the economy," he noted. "The president's ratings on handling of the economy and the tariffs are in the 30s, and his overall approval now is in the mid to low 40s, and that's not a good place to be a hundred days in."
Rove's comments so angered the president, he lashed out online, dismissing Rove as "a total loser who's been wrong about everything."
Ignore the polls "at your own risk."
But veteran pollster Dave Paleologos of Suffolk University said "you ignore [the polls] at your own risk," and recalled how then-President Biden waved off his polling collapse after the disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, only to learn it had become his new normal. "What Rove is pointing out is you'd better address these quickly, address the tariffs, which he probably will, and the economy before you have the Biden effect, which is once you go underwater, you stay underwater."
Paleologos agrees with Rove that blunders like posting an online impersonation of the Pope don't help. But he predicts Trump will amend his economic policies in reaction to negative polls. "If people learn by their polling, they'll do quite well; otherwise, they're doomed to fail," he said.
We're so far away from the midterm elections, you may wonder how much polls even matter right now. And there's no doubt they definitely can change, although as Paleologos points out, it's not written in granite that they will.
But Republican control of Congress is on the line next year, and we're not far from the point where members worried about being dragged down by Trump disapproval could start peeling off on key votes.
So these polls do matter, and you can bet they're a source of concern in the White House.
