Even better than head to head polls is approval rating polling when there is an incumbent president,its never been wrong and unlike head to head polling it picks the overall winner rather than the popular vote winner.Its 11 out of 11 since this article was posted while Trump was President,
Can Trump break this six-decade U.S. election pattern?
The pattern: If the president’s approval rating is “above water,” meaning more approvers than disapprovers, he wins a second term. If the president has a negative approval rating, he loses.
How many of the laws of history can Donald Trump repeal?
I don’t claim to know. And history doesn’t really have “laws” that can be enforced, just precedents and patterns formed by the accumulation of those precedents.
One such pattern, which has held in every election that involved an incumbent president since the emergence of the political polling industry, is this: If the president’s approval rating is “above water,” meaning more approvers than disapprovers, he wins a second term. If the president has a negative approval rating, he loses.
This has been true in 10 out of 10 instances in the era of modern polling, dating back to the 1950s, the era that includes the last 16 presidential elections — including the 10 that involved an incumbent president. In every one of those 10, as I just mentioned, if the president had more approvers than disapprovers, he was re-elected. If more disapprovers than approvers, he was defeated.
