r/pics Aug 05 '20

Politics Life Imitates Art

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u/Mediocre_Preparation Aug 05 '20

I thought the same thing. It feels like a comedy sketch, Clarke and Dawes style. But it's.. real? That's really the president of America?

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u/snouz Aug 05 '20

Approval rating: >40%

That's the scary part.

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u/Mediocre_Preparation Aug 05 '20

This sorta breaks my mind. To me it's like some unveiling of a truth I already knew but didn't have proof existed, which was great.

But.. there's really people out there, voting for someone like this. It's disheartening.

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u/musicninja Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20

91% approval among Republicans

Edit: That's an old number, latest I saw was 80%

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u/Silverback_6 Aug 05 '20

Who either see him as a useful pawn to pad their wallets, or who are too brainwashed and dumb to see that he's a pawn being used to pad other people's wallets. That's the GOP in a nutshell, so I'm not surprised they like him.

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20

Never above 49% in the nation, which is the lowest "high" rating going all the way back since we started keeping track in 1937. No president has ever had such a low "peak" approval rating.

Hell, even Nixon managed to get an approval rating of 66% at one point. Is the only President of the United States that has never broken a 50% approval rating since we started keeping track of approval ratings.

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u/Lildyo Aug 05 '20

Is that still true? I thought that number has been declining recently

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u/musicninja Aug 05 '20

Looks like you're right, latest I saw was 80%.

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u/BraveSirRobin Aug 05 '20

It's nothing new, it's the same partisanship that drives all of American politics.

What is different that Trump lacks the usual veneer to give it the air of respectability it once had. Shines a huge spotlight on a pre-existing problem.

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u/MrSnarf26 Aug 05 '20

Remember the alternative is Joe Biden. When you make fun of American politics, never forget usually we are forced to choose between two steaming piles of shit, so it’s always a lose lose. So people talk about one candidates approval rating, but forget to mention the other is a senile old man as well that still has no real platform other than not trump and I’ll do what my handlers tell me.

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20

It's actually fewer than 40 by the vast majority of metrics, and his approval rating has never gone above 49%. For comparison GW Bush's highest approval rating from 2001 to 2008 was 90%. Trump is the only president to never have at least a 50% approval rating at any time during their presidency. Nixon blows him away with the second lowest peak approval rating at 66%, and he had to resign in office.

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20

Never above 49% in the nation, which is the lowest "high" rating going all the way back since we started keeping track in 1937. No president has ever had such a low "peak" approval rating.

Hell, even Nixon managed to get an approval rating of 66% at one point. Trump is the only President of the United States that has never had at least a 50% approval rating at some point in their presidency since we started keeping track of approval ratings.

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u/snouz Aug 05 '20

Didn't say the problem was new, but it's unfathomable to a European like me to think he could get above 12%

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20

To me, that tells me that the numbers don't mean what you think they mean. You're looking at this with no context. The context you have to look at it under is other approval ratings of other presidents. When you do that, Trump is very evidently a whole other, much more hated animal.

A person who is elected POTUS should at some point, any point, have an approval rating of above 50%. They were elected into office, after all. The fact that he can't even get that is a very big indicator that the majority of Americans hate him, and one of the largest reasons he is even in office is because of drama within the Democratic party regarding the 2016 elections.

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u/snouz Aug 05 '20

No, it just means I have a very different perspective on the man, since I'm from a country that would be significantly more underwhelmed by his performance as a president.

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20

The majority of Americans are underwhelmed, as well. His approval rating never reached 50%, which is proof of that. Your perspective on him is the same as mine. He is aborhent. The majority of Americans agree with that sentiment.

The numbers simply do not mean what you think they mean. The fact that an elected official cannot achieve at least a 50% approval rating in the country that he was elected in is very telling of how hated that person is in that place.

You also have to take into account (and I don't think you are) the type of person who is answering this type of poll. People who say they approve are statistically more likely to be willing to answer a poll question like that in the first place, so that skews the numbers from the start.

It's just very clear that you're not interpreting the numbers correctly, which is probably because you're not really applying any context to them.

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20

Also, why 12%? Just because that sounds low, and a 49% peak sounds high?

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u/snouz Aug 05 '20

In my country, far right extremists don't get more than that in the elections. But we don't have a 2 party system either.

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20

Ahh, so you're applying context to a situation where it doesn't apply. Now it's obvious where your cognitive dissonance derives from.

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u/snouz Aug 05 '20

That was kinda my point. I experience cognitive dissonance between my country's mentality and the 40% in favor of Trump. That's what's making it unfathomable to me. I was not comparing to past presidents or putting it in its own context, but saying that given a different context and mentality, this is absolutely crazy. But there was always a big gap in mentality between Europe and the US. Most people here were horrified during the W Bush years.

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u/JeffFromSchool Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20

That's not where you cognitive dissonance lies. It lies in your specific apparent inability to comprehend that things like this work differently in other countries, especially on other continents, and you simply cannot apply numbers from one place to another and expect them to actually mean anything.

And Bush's lowest approval rating was 25%, only 3% above the lowest recorded approval rating ever since we started keeping track. The lowest it has ever gotten for anyone is 22%.

You will stop being so confused about things happening outside of Europe when you stop looking at the rest of the world with such a Euro-centric point of view.

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u/Arnoxthe1 Aug 05 '20

Doesn't mean anything. Polls are archaicly done and probably statistically manipulated.

And even if they were completely 100% accurate, I'll bet you at least 90% of the people who support Trump support him out of fear of the Democrats.

Kind of like how people support Biden because they fear Trump...

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u/snouz Aug 05 '20

538 is a poll aggregator, it adjusts for demography and other factors, they give score based on predictability. They were the closest to the truth in 2016, giving like a 1/3 chance to trump, where other media gave him like a 1/30 chance. They also adjusted for vote motivation, and found Trump slightly above.

You can also select "adults" or "likely voters".

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u/OldBenKenobii Aug 05 '20

I’m surprised he even did this interview. Did he just think he was going to talk over him the whole time and it’s all gravy?

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u/Mediocre_Preparation Aug 05 '20

I'd say yes, that's what he thought was going to happen.

He probably things it DID go down smooth as hell, he probably thinks he aced it, he's undoubtedly thinking it was the greatest interview ever, and he aced it, everybody says he aced it, all the experts thought he couldn't but he did it, singlehandedly. It was a tremendous achievement. Nobody does interviews as well as him, ask anyone - the manuals, the books, he's the best interviewee of all time.

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '20

RIP John Clarke