President Trump’s job approval rating has ticked up 1 percentage point since the end of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, the first increase in six weeks, according to a new poll.
A Hill-HarrisX survey released Wednesday found that 46 percent of registered voters approve of the president’s job performance, compared with 54 percent who disapproved.
Trump has been at a 45-percent approval rating since Feb. 17. The increase in the April 1-2 survey is within the 3.1 percent sampling margin of error for all Hill-HarrisX polls.
The latest survey was the first by Hill-HarrisX following the completion of Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.
According to Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of Mueller’s final report, submitted to Congress on March 24, the special counsel did not find evidence of conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Moscow. The president and his supporters have said the report’s findings vindicate Trump.
Since the previous March 18 survey, the percentage of voters who strongly approve of the president’s job performance increased by 2 points, to 23 percent. The share of people who somewhat approve of Trump decreased by 1 point, to 23 percent, while those who somewhat disapprove of him increased by 1 point.
All three groups were smaller than the 39 percent of respondents who strongly disapprove of Trump. The percentage of people who strongly disapprove of the president was 2 points lower in the newer survey.
“The president’s approval rating…is mostly stable right now and that’s because voters don’t think about Russia as much as they do other issues. Russia is pretty low on the list,” David Byler, a columnist and data analyst at the Washington Post said Wednesday on “What America’s Thinking,” Hill.TV’s web show about public opinion and polling.
“Voters’ expectations for what would come out of the Mueller probe and the Barr summary were somewhat mixed,” he added. “Some voters might have been surprised that more wasn’t found, but a lot of voters didn’t really know what to expect.”
–Matthew Sheffield
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