President Donald Trump’s supporters are increasingly likely to think Republican lawmakers don’t back him, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. Fewer than half of those who voted for Trump last year now believe he has the support of most of the GOP.
Just 47 percent of Trump voters say that most or all of the Republicans in Congress generally support the president, down from 58 percent in a mid-July survey.
The poll follows a month of visible splits between the president and his party, with Trump criticizing the Senate GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare and some Republicans expressing discomfort with his response to the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful. And we need for him to be successful. Our nation needs for him to be successful,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), an early Trump supporter, said last week.
During August, Trump has spent more time criticizing Republicans than Democrats, according to a Washington Post analysis. He has taken particular aim at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell and Trump are reportedly no longer on speaking terms. The president has also publicly feuded with Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of his most prominent intra-party critics.
Although the loyalty of Trump’s rank-and-file supporters has also shown signs of erosion this year, most don’t appear to be following the cues of party leaders in cooling toward the president.
Asked about a hypothetical spat between Trump and the congressional GOP, Trump voters are overwhelmingly more loyal to the president: 71 percent say they would side with Trump in a disagreement, while just 8 percent said they’d back the Republican lawmakers. That 63-point margin is effectively unchanged from last month.
Members of the Republican Party would also back Trump over his congressional counterparts, albeit by a narrower margin of 58 percent to 19 percent.
The widget below lets you further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, by using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Aug. 22-23 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.
HuffPost 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. 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.