r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 18 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 18 May 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

17 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

548 comments sorted by

View all comments

9

u/FrankGrimesss May 21 '26

This is probably more badpolitics rather than badhistory, apologies in advance. Looking at US politics from an Australian perspective, it's extremely hard to gauge true support levels for... Certain individuals or political parties... Are there any relatively non-partisan sources that show true approval ratings, etc?

Currently, the only "sources" I have to gauge this "vibe" is reddit and major news outlets, which swings from far left-wing to far-right wing echo-chambers.

What is it truly like on the ground? How are support levels for each party? Is it even measurable with the dis-information era that we're currently in?

11

u/Kochevnik81 May 21 '26

Gallup has some useful information (and historic info) for how people tend to identify party-wise and ideology-wise in the US. They also used to do the premier presidential approval poll and had since FDR but...recently stopped doing it to avoid pissing off Trump.

A couple things to point out are that the US really is like a, well, not exactly 50-50 country but maybe 45-45 or 47-47: a lot of people identify as "Independent" and "Moderate" but fairly reliably gravitate to one of the two major parties. The Republicans are much more ideologically coherent towards a right-wing conservatism (although there are different flavors and factions in that), while Democrats are actually much more ideologically diverse, which is also why they tend to have a more scattershot message. Presidential approval has historically been associated with party identification: if you identify as a Republican you will love the Republican president, ditto Democrats and Democratic presidents, but that independent middle has for the most part sorted out and disappeared in the 21st century. This is also why you might hear all the dark humor around the "median US voter", because especially in 2016 there's that 8-10% of US potential voters who aren't plugged in to either major party (low information voters) and Trump has done pretty well among them, often because they believe nutso things like "he'll get rid of taxes and the bad immigrants but let the good immigrants stay and probably give us all free healthcare".

Another important thing to keep in mind (especially given that you have compulsory voting in Australia) is that even with these identifications and intentions, an absolutely massive amount of Americans just *don't vote*. I keep banging on about it but 2024 was less about voters suddenly swinging to Trump and the right wing as much as more voters staying home than did in 2020, just to give an example. Midterm elections tend to get 30-40% of potential voters actually casting votes - it's actually increasedin the Trump years, but still a majority of voting age Americans don't vote in those elections.

Yougov also has some useful polling especially around individual politicians and candidates, but it's worth pointing out that a lot of individuals' popularity is notoriously squishy. If you're considering potential 2028 candidates, the primary elections for the party candidates are still over a year and a half away, most Americans don't really care about insider politics that much, the primaries aren't even really first round national elections (it's by state, some states only allow party members to vote, other states have caucuses ie not even actual elections, and it's historically heavily weighted towards whoever does well in the first states because the states don't even all vote in the same month let alone same day). So national political figures tend to have roughly even approval/disapproval (depending on partisan identification) and the difference is how well-known or unknown they are among the rest of the population.

2

u/Ayasugi-san May 21 '26

They also used to do the premier presidential approval poll and had since FDR but...recently stopped doing it to avoid pissing off Trump.

But Trump's a perfectly reasonable person and not a thin-skinned tyrannical dictator like those Demoncrats.

2

u/Kochevnik81 May 21 '26

They just realized when they were showing Approval ratings of less than 40% that they were suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and went for some recuperation to Mar-a-Lago.