For a first-year president, Trump’s presidential leverage is at a historic low.
For a person, indeed a president, so obsessed with “ratings,” Donald Trump must find his approval ratings jarring. While virtually all presidents start their terms with high approval, Trump started low, sank fast, and kept digging. Even George W. Bush, who came to office after a heavily contested election, began with 57 percent approval. Meanwhile, Trump, who is now approaching the milestone one-year mark of his presidency, has languished in the 30s for months, averaging just under 39 percent. To be sure, a few presidents have endured approval levels below his, but they did so in the midst of extraordinary times: Truman during the Korean War, Nixon on the cusp of resignation, Ford following his pardon of Nixon, Carter in the midst of the Iran-Hostage crisis, George H.W. Bush on the brink of losing the presidency to Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush post-Hurricane Katrina all posted lower approval ratings. Even Barack Obama briefly dipped into the 30s in September 2011, during the budget negotiation debacle. But no one has begun so low and fallen so quickly and consistently as Donald Trump.
Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics. Presidents with high approval ratings are likely to be deemed powerful, particularly by the media, whereas presidents with low or middling opinion are seen as weak or ineffective. But is approval all it’s cracked up to be?
Presidential approval is arguably the most cited statistic in American politics—but is it all it's cracked up to be?
When Americans think of presidential approval, they often do so by isolating on the president, reporting a number without reference to the larger context of government within which all presidents reside. But these ratings are only part of the story. My research in Presidential Leverage shows that examining approval alongside the public’s trust in government locates the president in American politics relative to government broadly conceived, and yields a more meaningful snapshot of the president’s public standing and consequent political clout. High or low approval ratings are indicators of presidential standing with the public, to be sure, but they cannot be quarantined from the public view of government as a whole. A president may have high approval ratings, but if that measure mirrors similarly high approval ratings for the larger government, those high marks may not translate into political capital, or what I call presidential leverage. For instance, why would a president with high approval have any greater leverage with the public if that same public holds the rest of government in similarly high esteem?
Presidential leverage can be calculated by dividing presidential approval by the public’s trust in government. The more the public esteem for the president exceeds their trust in government, the more leverage a president has in the political world. That seems to be because the public views the presidency in a much more favorable light than government, so presidents who have high leverage tend to be the “best” or the “only” game in town. Even more interesting, as presidents decline in leverage, they are more likely to act in ways to protect their standing and raise it. Yet Trump, who was swept into office on a swamp-draining crusade, has not acted in the way that other presidents have, and while his outsider status was an oft-touted merit during this time of low public trust in the government, marshaling that leverage in office has proven difficult.
Government has become decidedly less trustworthy over time: In the 1950s and early 1960s the public held government in high esteem; the 1960s and 1970s, however, ushered in the eras of Vietnam and Watergate, and trust in the government took a beating, falling to levels from which it has never fully recovered (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Presidential Approval and Public Trust, 1961–2017
Calculating presidential leverage, or the Index of Presidential Leverage (IPL) is straightforward. As noted above, it is simply approval divided by trust in government, a measure of public satisfaction with government writ large. When we consider leverage rather than approval, we locate the place of presidents in relation to government, and we see a great deal of variation not only between individual presidents, but even across individual presidents’ terms (see Figure 2). The IPL is a relative measure, meaning that high approval ratings are neither necessary nor sufficient for high leverage. Kennedy, for example, enjoyed high approval, albeit at the same time trust in government was high (Figure 1). Thus, his IPL was good, but not spectacular (Figure 2).
Similarly, Jimmy Carter had mediocre ratings in 1977, his first year in office, though he enjoyed high leverage given that public trust in the government was extremely low. Thus, at least for the first year, the presidency was the best game in town, though Carter failed to prioritize his agenda and left Congress guessing at his priorities, which led to lower leverage as his term matured.
Figure 2: Annual Presidential Leverage, 1961–2017
The average annual IPL from President Kennedy’s first term through to Trump’s first year is 1.19. Trump’s IPL comes in at a well-below average 1.08, but it is far from the lowest, as Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George W. Bush all registered lower IPLs at one time or another (Trump currently registers about where Reagan did in 1987, the year of the Iran-Contra scandal). Trump’s IPL is, however, the lowest registered in the first year of any president, save for Richard Nixon’s .994 in 1969. Like many post-Watergate presidencies, Trump is “helped” by consistently low levels of approval for the larger government, making even an unpopular president the beneficiary of some degree of leverage.
Of the findings in Presidential Leverage, I want to highlight a few here. First, it should be noted that when the same statistical models were estimated using the raw measure of presidential approval rather than the IPL, those models were less powerful and in many cases the variables for approval were statistically insignificant. This means that using the IPL, which was statistically significant in all models, is at least as good or better in gaining purchase on the dynamics of presidential place in the public mind and how that helps translate into political action.
Second, it was interesting to note that weaker presidents seem to act in a defensive posture by, among other things, issuing more executive orders, asking for more in the State of the Union address, centralizing policy making in the White House, and increasing political staff. President Trump has in some ways acted accordingly, while departing dramatically in other ways. Where this administration has diverged from other weakly leveraged presidents is in the making of public policy. Trump’s administration has thus far rarely crafted policy in the White House, leaving to Congress the task of drafting legislation. To be sure, the President makes clear what he wants, but often equivocates—the most recent example being his meeting on immigration earlier this month, much of which was open to the media, during which time Trump proclaimed that he would accept any bill that Congress put on his desk. Perhaps Trump could learn something from other weakly leveraged presidents who centralized policy making by drafting legislation within their administations and sold the bill to Congress and the public.
Weaker presidents seem to act in a defensive posture.
Where Trump has acted like other weak presidents is in his issuance of executive orders. According to the American Presidency Project, Trump is averaging fifty-eight executive orders a year, a particularly high number when one considers that he governs in a time of unified partisan control of Congress and the executive, the most of any president since Carter’s average of eighty. To be sure, Carter also held office in times of unified control, but also ran into difficulty with co-partisans in Congress. While we do not know what Trump will ask for in the State of the Union on January 30, we will see if he asks for a lot (like other weak presidents), or chooses a few things to concentrate his energy on. Finally, while I have not looked at the political staff in the Executive Office of the President, it is well known that many top administration positions remain unfilled. Though Trump says this is by design, others claim that his failure to nominate people to these vacant positions and have them confirmed threatens his agenda.
And that agenda remains largely unfulfilled, likely in part because of Trump’s meager leverage. The data reveals that, compared to weakly leveraged presidents, presidents with higher IPLs have a higher proportion of significant policies that emanate from the White House than Congress passed into law. In keeping with this principle, the one and only real legislative achievement that Trump has under his belt to date is a sweeping tax reform bill that will surely be considered significant, though it was largely drafted in Congress, albeit with the administration’s input.
In sum, there is ample time for the President to turn things around, and the fact that many presidents experienced high variation in their IPLs over the course of their administrations should give some indication that the President’s leverage could very well increase, although such prospects grow more dim as time goes on. First-year presidents tend to get more of what they want, and that window is now closing. It is often hard to get anything done in election years, and presidents are less successful in general as their terms age. Whatever happens over the next three years, the President could learn something from other weakly leveraged presidents, many of whom saw their administrations enjoy significant political and policy successes. But time to turn the tide may already be running out.
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