Thread: Trump's popularity is slipping in rural America: poll

Trump's popularity is slipping in rural America: poll

October 9, 2017 / 7:07 AM / Updated an hour ago
Chris Kahn, Tim Reid

(Reuters) - Outside the Morgan County fair in McConnelsville, in a rural swath of Ohio that fervently backed U.S. President Donald Trump in last year’s election, ticket seller John Wilson quietly counts off a handful of disappointments with the man he helped elect.

The 70-year-old retired banker said he is unhappy with infighting and turnover in the White House. He does not like Trump’s penchant for traveling to his personal golf resorts. He wishes the president would do more to fix the healthcare system, and he worries that Trump might back down from his promise to force illegal immigrants out of the country.

“Every president makes mistakes,” Wilson said. “But if you add one on top of one, on top of another one, on top of another, there’s just a limit.”

Trump, who inspired millions of supporters last year in places like Morgan County, has been losing his grip on rural America.

According to the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll, the Republican president’s popularity is eroding in small towns and rural communities where 15 percent of the country’s population lives. The poll of more than 15,000 adults in “non-metro” areas shows that they are now as likely to disapprove of Trump as they are to approve of him.

In September, 47 percent of people in non-metro areas approved of Trump while 47 percent disapproved. That is down from Trump’s first four weeks in office, when 55 percent said they approved of the president while 39 percent disapproved.

The poll found that Trump has lost support in rural areas among men, whites and people who never went to college. He lost support with rural Republicans and rural voters who supported him on Election Day.

And while Trump still gets relatively high marks in the poll for his handling of the economy and national security, rural Americans are increasingly unhappy with Trump’s record on immigration, a central part of his presidential campaign.

Forty-seven percent of rural Americans said in September they approved of the president’s handling of immigration, down from 56 percent during his first month in office.

Poll respondents who were interviewed by Reuters gave different reasons for their dissatisfaction with the president on immigration.

A few said they are tired of waiting for Trump to make good on his promise to build a wall along America’s southern border, while others said they were uncomfortable with his administration’s efforts to restrict travel into the United States.

“There should be some sort of compromise between a free flow of people over the border and something that’s more controlled,” said Drew Carlson, 19, of Warrensburg, Missouri, who took the poll.

But Trump’s “constant fixation on deportation is a little bit unsettling to me.”

The Trump administration would not comment about the Reuters/Ipsos poll. (For a graphic depicting poll results, see: tmsnrt.rs/2yuVIun)

To be sure, Trump is still much more popular in rural America than he is elsewhere.

Since he took office, “I like him less, but I support him more,” said Robert Cody, 87, a retired chemical engineer from Bartlesville, Oklahoma who took the poll.

Cody said that Trump may rankle some people with the way he talks and tweets, but it is a small price to pay for a president who will fight to strip away government regulations and strengthen the border.

DROPPING OFF THE SCREEN

When Trump called the election a ”last shot“ for the struggling coal industry and when he called for protecting the nation’s southern border with a “big, fat, beautiful wall”, he was speaking directly to rural America, said David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University.

“Feelings of resentment and deprivation have pervaded a lot of these places,” Swenson said. “And here comes a candidate (Trump) who’s offering simplistic answers” to issues that concern them.

Rural Americans responded by supporting Trump over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by 26 percentage points during the election, an advantage that helped tip the balance in battleground states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump won by less than 1 percentage point.

But after 10 months, many are still waiting to see concrete changes that could make life easier in rural America, said Karl Stauber, who runs a private economic development agency serving a patchwork of manufacturing communities in south central Virginia.

“Rural people are more cynical about the federal government than people in general are,” Stauber said. “They’ve heard so many promises, and they’ve not seen much done.”

Despite all the talk of bringing manufacturing jobs back, Stauber said he has not seen any companies which have relocated to his region, or anyone expand their workforce, due to new federal policies.

“It just seems like we’ve dropped off the screen,” he said.

According to the poll, Trump’s overall popularity has dropped gradually, and for different reasons, this year.

Rural Americans were increasingly unhappy with Trump’s handling of healthcare in March and April after he lobbied for a Republican plan to overhaul Obamacare and cut coverage for millions of Americans.

In May and June, they were more critical of Trump’s ability to carry out U.S. foreign policy, and they gave him lower marks for “the way he treats people like me.”

In August, they were increasingly unhappy with “the effort he’s making to unify the country” after he blamed “both sides” for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a suspected white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist demonstrators.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English across the United States. It asked people to rate the president’s performance and the results were filtered for people who lived in zip codes that fell within counties designated as “non-metro” by the federal government.

The poll combined the results of “non-metro” respondents into nine, four-week periods. Each period included between 1,300 and 2,000 responses and had a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points.

Reporting by Chris Kahn and Tim Reid; Editing by Jonathan Oatis

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN1CE162

Rural Americans were increasingly unhappy with Trump’s handling of healthcare in March and April after he lobbied for a Republican plan to overhaul Obamacare and cut coverage for millions of Americans.

Trump needs to attack Healthcare the same way he's attacking illegal immigration. Trump needs to send a memo to all related agencies, DHHS, Treasury, Commerce, DOJ and OMB and ask for their recommendations to reduce costs to government, reduced costs to insured, and reduced costs to states and communities. Then have an expert like Mulvaney to draw up a 70 point health care plan. The US Congress is not competent enough to do this as they've shown all by themselves. Trump thought Republicans had a plan only to find out they had no plan at all. In the meantime, he needs to move forward on Executive Orders and Regulatory Changes to open up interstate competition by "erasing the lines" and demand the US Senate pass the bill already passed by the House to repeal McCarran-Ferguson Act, while moving forward with a White House Health Care Plan, get it into a bill and promote the heck out of it until it passes.

What Trump and most of US didn't know is that this Congress doesn't want to repeal and replace Obamacare. Trump and US will have to write it, promote it and demand passage of it.

Immediate fix to healthcare costs is BOOT every refugee, asylum and illegal alien OFF our healthcare and out of our Doctor's offices and Hospitals.

E-VERIFY healthcare, hospital, Doctor office and our schools.

They cost us a fortune! I do not want to pay for their healthcare or their education...get them out of here!

Many have diseases and medical issues, TB, diabetes, dialysis, respiratory disease, cancer, tumors, disabilities...stop FORCING us to pick up the tab for this.

Send them HOME to their countries to take care of and pay for them.

We have our own to take care of!

STOP ALL MIGRATION, LEGAL AND ILLEGAL, STOP ALL REFUGEES AND ASYLUM FOR 20 YEARS!!!!

GET THIS BURDEN OFF THE BACKS OF USA AND IT'S TAXPAYERS

Bannon believes Trump only has 30% chance of completing full term

Bannon is the one who said the US has no military option against North Korea.

Originally Posted by Judy

Bannon is the one who said the US has no military option against North Korea.

Not attempting to be argumentative here, but I don't really see your point. So far we have not utilized a military option against North Korea and I don't expect one in the future.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Bannon believes Trump only has 30% chance of completing full term

That's an odd thing for Bannon to say, especially when he supposedly still supports Trump.