President Trump’s approval rating is at 46 percent going into Thursday’s expected release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s election interference, according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll.
The nationwide survey found that 22 percent of respondents said they “strongly approve” of the president’s job in office, with 24 percent saying they “somewhat approve.”
Trump’s disapproval rating is at 53 percent — 38 percent say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s job in office, and another 15 percent say they “somewhat disapprove.”
The president’s approval rating was unchanged from a Hill-HarrisX survey earlier this month, about a week after Attorney General William Barr sent Congress his four-page summary of Mueller’s findings, saying the special counsel did not find evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Barr said Mueller did not take a position on whether there was obstruction of justice on the part of the president.
The Justice Department is slated to release a redacted version of the Mueller report.
HarrisX CEO Dritan Nesho told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking” that Trump’s approval rating is being driven by issues, such as the economy.
“Voters tend to be driven as much by issues or more by issues than they are by personality,” Nesho said Wednesday. “Donald Trump gets pretty low scores on personal likability, but he does get pretty high scores on issues like the economy, stimulating jobs, and increasingly better scores on his handling of foreign policy, and his handling of terrorism.”
“These are big driving factors both for his approval and the fact that nothing seems to really stick on the president,” Nesho added.
The online survey was conducted April 15-16, among 1,000 registered voters. The sampling margin of error is 3.1 percentage points.
— Julia Manchester
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