Mark Penn's Monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll Analysis - Full Episode

Each month, presidential pollster Mark Penn shares an overview of the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll. This survey was conducted online within the United States from September 22-24, 2019 among 2,009 registered voters. Sign up at https://harvardharrispoll.com/ to have this and future survey reports delivered directly to your inbox.

The Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is a monthly poll released by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Insights and Analytics. The results reflect a nationally representative sample. Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, and education where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. 

Stephen D. Ansolabehere, Professor of Government & Director, Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University, Mark J. Penn, Visiting Lecturer, Harvard University & Managing Partner, The Stagwell Group and Dritan Nesho, Fellow, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science & CEO of HarrisX, are Co-Directors of the Poll with assistance from their students and faculty from the Harvard University community.

Welcome to the September Harvard CAPS Harris Poll Podcast. This week, I'd like to welcome Apple, Spotify, Google, and others who are beginning to pick up the podcast and distribute it to more and more listeners. If you've got any feedback or want to follow any developments, go to @Mark_Penn_Polls for updates. And with that, let's launch in to this month's poll that was fielded September 22nd to September 24th 2019, with 2009 registered voters, making this an important and timely poll given everything that's going on today.

So, what's happening with the job approval of President Trump, given all of the chaos and issues and the partisan fights that we're seeing over impeachment? Well, this poll was taken just before the formal inquiry really was announced, but during the buildup and already information out about the whistleblower. So given all that, would we be expected a significant change in President Trump's job approval? We might have, but that's not what we saw. What we've seen over the last couple of months, May, June, July, August, September, is a creeping back up of President Trump's approval, this month at 46% approve, 54% disapprove. I looked at a number of other polls out there, saw this similar trend that he was, until hit with a full-scale impeachment and the imbroglio over the whistleblower complaint, he was trending up. We'll see what happened next month, and whether or not he in fact drops to the bottom of the range, which we've seen before after incidents like this breakout.

Specifically, let's take a look at some of his job approval on some of the most important areas of the Presidency. His highest approval is for stimulating jobs 55%, the economy 54%, fighting terrorism 52%, immigration 47, approval on foreign affairs 43, and administering the government 44. If you look at the trend data, he's actually doing a little bit better on administering the government, stayed about the same range on foreign affairs, stayed about the same range on immigration, fighting terrorism, a little off highs, which were as strong as 56%, and stimulating jobs, also down from the high of 62 to 55%. So, still a significant majority approving of the job that he's doing on the economy, but off the highs that we had when 3.2% growth was announced.