Why Approval Ratings Rarely Tell You What You Think They Do

Presidential approval is one of the most-cited measurements in American politics, and one of the most misread. The number sounds like a verdict — the president is either doing well or doing badly, and the number tells you which. Most of the time, the number is doing something else. It is registering the steady weight of partisan identity, with a small fluctuating layer of actual sentiment on top.

Once you can see the two layers separately, approval coverage stops being mysterious. The big swings the headlines suggest are usually small movements in the top layer that look bigger because the bottom layer is stable. The big stability that critics complain about is mostly the bottom layer doing what it has done for forty years.

The partisan floor and ceiling

Approve or disapprove answers have changed across decades in one specific way: they have become more strongly correlated with party identification. A respondent who identifies with the president’s party is now likely to answer "approve" almost regardless of what the president has done in the previous week. A respondent who identifies with the opposing party is likely to answer "disapprove" with similar reliability.

In numerical terms, this means a modern Democratic president sits at roughly 85% approval among self-identified Democrats and 10% approval among self-identified Republicans, with the inverse for a Republican president. The floor and ceiling on national approval are set by these partisan baselines plus the share of self-identified independents who lean toward one party or the other.

The arithmetic produces a narrow effective range. A modern president almost never goes above 60% overall and almost never drops below 35%. The day-to-day movement happens inside that band, and the band itself does not move much across the term.

The small layer that actually responds

Above the partisan baseline, a smaller layer of voters changes their answer based on conditions. They tend to be self-identified independents, weak partisans, and a slice of opposing-party voters whose dissatisfaction with their own party is high enough to consider crossing over.

This persuadable layer responds to a few specific things. The state of the economy as they personally experience it — not what the indicators say, but what their grocery bill says. Major news events that override their normal partisan filter — wars, scandals, crises. And the cumulative trajectory of the administration over time, which absorbs slower-developing assessments about whether the president seems competent or careful.

Most policy news, despite the coverage it gets, barely moves the persuadable layer. A new piece of legislation, a foreign policy announcement, a court ruling — these do not usually produce measurable approval movement. The partisan baseline absorbs them through the usual frame, and the persuadable layer mostly does not engage with policy specifics. The number stays where it was.

What event-driven swings actually look like

When approval moves visibly, it usually traces a recognizable shape: an initial sharp swing of a few points in one direction, followed by a slower return toward the prior baseline over several weeks. The size of the initial swing is proportional to how surprising the event was, not how important. Sudden events move the number; slow-developing ones rarely do.

The return to baseline is the part most coverage misses. Even strong initial swings tend to claw back most of the way, as the partisan filter reabsorbs the event into the pre-existing frame. The exception is events that genuinely shift the underlying assessment — but those are rare, and the shifts usually only become visible in retrospect.

A reporter watching a one-week swing of three points often treats it as a real shift. Three weeks later the number is back where it started, and the reporter has moved on. The actual shape of the data — initial swing, mostly-recovered return — is recognizable from past cycles and provides a useful frame for reading any single news event’s effect.

Why the band has narrowed

Comparing modern approval ratings to historical ones, the most striking pattern is how much the effective range has compressed. Eisenhower hit the seventies. Both Bushes briefly cleared eighty. Truman and Carter dropped into the twenties. Those swings were possible because partisan identification was weaker, more voters considered themselves genuinely persuadable, and more voters answered approval questions based on performance assessments rather than party loyalty.

In the contemporary environment, that flexibility has shrunk. The polarization in approval responses tracks the broader polarization of American politics. Voters now answer most political questions through a partisan lens — not because they have stopped thinking, but because the lens has become more reliable as a guide to their other views. Approval has been pulled into the same pattern.

The narrower band has implications. A modern president is not at much risk of a 1973 Nixon-style collapse, because the partisan floor will hold even under serious scandal. A modern president is also not capable of a 1991 Bush-style summit at 80%, because the partisan ceiling will block even broadly popular conduct from being credited by the opposite party. The instrument has lost most of its high and low.

The reelection signal

Approval ratings do correlate with reelection, but in a softer way than coverage often suggests. A president consistently above 50% in the year before the election usually wins reelection. A president consistently below 40% usually loses. Between those bounds, approval is a weak predictor — close races are decided by factors approval does not capture, including the strength of the opposing candidate, the state of the economy in specific swing regions, and the turnout dynamics in the final months.

The timing also matters. Approval six months before an election is less predictive than approval one month before. The closer to the election, the more the number reflects the actual conditions of the race rather than ambient political weather. A president who recovers from low approval into the campaign’s final weeks can win; one who has high approval that dips late can lose. The trajectory matters more than any single snapshot.

For a viewer trying to read approval as a forecast, the more reliable approach is to watch the slope across the year and pay particular attention to the final months. A flat number well above 50% in the final stretch is a strong signal. A number trending downward into a tight band around 50% suggests a competitive race regardless of the spot value.

A more useful way to read approval

Two habits make approval coverage more informative. First, look at the rolling average across several weeks rather than the spot value on any given day. The average smooths the sampling variation and lets the trajectory show through. The slope of the line tells you something the spot value does not.

Second, look at the gap between the president’s approval and the share of voters identifying with his party. That gap is the most useful proxy for the actual persuadable layer. A president whose approval is running five points below his party’s share has lost some persuadable voters; a president whose approval is running three points above has gained some. The gap tells you about movement that the headline number conceals.

Done with those two habits, the approval rating becomes what it actually is: a stable, slow-moving instrument for tracking sentiment about a specific person doing a specific job. Not a verdict, not a forecast, not the dramatic headline it gets played as. Just a measurement, doing its modest job, with most of its variation living in a narrow band the partisan structure has carved out for it.