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President Donald Trump's net approval rating saw a positive shift, however, still remains negative, according to the latest Economist/YouGov poll released on Tuesday (August 12).
The survey, which was conducted between August 9 and 11, showed that 44% of U.S. adult citizens had a favorable opinion on Trump, while 52% viewed him unfavorably, for a net score of -7. The president had previously had a 42% favorable rating and a 56% unfavorable rating for a -14 net score during last weeks poll, as well s a 50% favorable and 48% unfavorable rating for a +3 net score at the beginning of his term.
Polling expert Nate Silver reported that Trump's net approval rating has reportedly "fluctuated between -.8.5 and -8.9" since August 1 and seen a "relatively consistent decline" between June and late July, but has "reached another steady state," in his Silver Bulletin Substack released on Monday (August 11). Silver noted that the president's scheduled meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and potentially Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as his latest round of tariffs taking effect last week, could factor into another shift.
Last month, Silver reported that Trump's approval rating had "started to drop more quickly" on his Substack blog. Silver gained notoriety for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election, as well as former President Barack Obama's re-election win in 2012 and Biden's win in the 2020 election.
The pollster was, however, criticized for giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning over Trump after the former president 304 electoral college votes to win the election.
"I think people shouldn’t have been so surprised," Silver told the Harvard Gazette in 2017. "Clinton was the favorite, but the polls showed, in our view, particularly at the end, a highly competitive race in the Electoral College. We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence. Why did people think it was much less than that? I think there are a few things."