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Introducing the Trump Tracker

Published
February 14, 2017
Tags
politicsdata

Current millennial approval ratings, updated daily

To track and visualize Trump’s approval ratings over time, we built a public Trump Tracker, with timelines that measure millennial opinion on controversial issues since he started his campaign. Hundreds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 are voting every day. Check out the demographic breakdowns of his overall approval rating as it stands right now.

Notice the dip in Trump’s approval ratings the week after the immigration ban, and how it mainly came out of the share of people responding “Don’t know” to the polls.
Notice the dip in Trump’s approval ratings the week after the immigration ban, and how it mainly came out of the share of people responding “Don’t know” to the polls.

Each timeline includes an Analyze button for viewing demographic breakdowns on each poll, along with a table showing how different universities voted from around the country. Each survey has between 1,867 and 11,312 respondents at the time of writing, yielding a margin of error that’s among the best in the polling industry (< 2%, for a 95% confidence interval).

Why Time-Tracking Matters

A notable takeaway from these visualizations is how sensitive millennial opinions are to events covered by the media. Notice the dip in presidential approval pictured above, which occurred after Trump’s executive order on Jan 27 barring entry into the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries. (This aligns with Gallup’s job approval poll.)

Even more pronounced, check out the crushing dip in Trump’s favorability after the first presidential debate on September 26th 2016, and then the incredible rebound after the second debate on October 9th:

Changes in presidential candidate preferences taken from the 
Changes in presidential candidate preferences taken from the Trump Tracker. Millennials ended up favoring Hillary Clinton on election day, which we predicted in a separate article here.

This shows the importance of maintaining continuous surveys instead of doing one-offs over just a few days, like Fox News’ 5-day Quinnipiac Poll on the immigration ban. These are easily biased by rousing and concurrent events in the news. In Fox’s case, not only was the January 5th poll taken a whole month prior to the immigration ban’s enactment, but it also coincided with the Fort Lauderdale shooting that same weekend, which likely biased it towards the side promoting national security.

The future of polling is in continuously measuring what people think. Opinions aren’t timeless, so polls shouldn’t be either.

This post originally appeared in Winsights, a publication by Whatsgoodly.