How Popular Is President Trump?

What is Donald Trump's approval rating? The truth is he has many different ratings, depending on who is asking, whom is asked, what question is asked and a pollster's basic methodology.

FiveThirtyEight, the news website and poll aggregator started by Nate Silver, created a new interactive graph that charts Trump's approval as averaged across different pollsters. It accounts for the strength of different firms, margins of uncertainty and divergent methodologies. (For more information on this and other political stories, subscribe to the White House Patch for daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

There's some complicated math that goes into creating the model, as you might expect. But the results are pretty clear. At the time of this post, the headline numbers indicate that 49.9 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, while 43.7 percent approve.

Check out the full interactive graphic here.

The new graphic has some unique features that differentiate it from other metrics. First, it weights different pollsters by their "house effect." A house effect is a poll's bias or lean, as measured by its tendency to diverge from polling averages in a particular direction.

For example, Rasmussen Reports, which the president has approvingly cited, tends to produce more Trump-friendly results. Gallup tends to have somewhat less favorable ratings for the president than other polls. When factoring these polls into the approval tracker, they're weighted by the extent to which they tend to diverge from all other polls.

The interactive also weights polls by how historically accurate they have been, by how many people they poll and by what type of people they poll. Some pollsters ask all American adults their opinions of the president, while others ask only registered voters or likely voters.

Polls of likely and registered voters show Trump with a slightly higher approval rating than those that query all adults.

For more details on how the graphic is created, read about FiveThirtyEight's aggregation methodology.

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