A majority of the public isn’t impressed with President Donald Trump’s progress toward his oft-repeated promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey.
Fifty-two percent say that Trump has done “not very well” or “not at all well” at upholding his promise to “drain the swamp of government corruption,” with only 30 percent saying he’s done even somewhat well. Just 6 percent think he’s done “very well” at fulfilling that pledge.
Unsurprisingly, views are deeply polarized, although Trump’s opponents are quicker to condemn his performance than his supporters are to laud him for it.
More than 90 percent of Americans who supported Hillary Clinton in last year’s election say that Trump hasn’t done well at fulfilling his promise, with 80 percent saying he’s done “not at all well,” the lowest category. By contrast, while 70 percent of Trump voters say he’s done at least “somewhat well,” just 15 percent credit him with doing “very well” at keeping his campaign pledge to drain the swamp.
Forty percent of the public says that Trump himself is less honest than most other politicians in Washington. Another 28 percent say he’s more honest than most, and 18 percent say he’s about average.
Even after several months as the nation’s top-ranking elected official, Trump still isn’t seen as a political insider. Sixty-nine percent of Americans still consider him to be more of an outsider, with just 12 percent saying he’s part of the establishment.
Not everyone sees that as a good thing. Just a third of Americans now say they’d rather vote for a politician who’s more of an outsider, down from the 46 percent last September who said they’d prefer to see outsiders elected both as president and to serve in Congress. Fourteen percent now say they’d prefer to vote for an establishment politician, and 53 percent say it doesn’t matter or that they’re unsure.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted April 5 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.