Poll: Trump's approval rating remains stable leading up to RNC

President Donald Trump’s overall job approval rating and voter assessments of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic have remained stable this summer, according to data from the NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Tracking Poll, despite a spike in virus cases and a rising death toll.

And ahead of the Republican National Convention that began on Monday, it's good news for the president that his base of supporters show no signs of leaving him.

Among American adults, President Trump has averaged a 44 percent job approval rating in the tracking poll from those who either “strongly” or “somewhat” approve of his overall job performance. His handling of the coronavirus is similar at 43 percent.

In the newest available data, 45 percent of American adults strongly or somewhat approve of the president’s job performance, while 54 percent somewhat or strongly disapprove. Forty-four percent of adults strongly or somewhat approve of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, while 54 somewhat or strongly disapprove.

However, the president's approval ratings have consistently been lower than that of the state governors across the nation. This week’s data show 56 percent of adults strongly or somewhat approve of their state’s governor’s handling of the pandemic. Forty-one percent of adults somewhat or strongly disapprove.

But the president and governors’ approval ratings are not the only things that have remained unchanged since the beginning of July. In each week of the NBC|SurveyMonkey poll, a majority of adults have said they view the coronavirus outbreak as more of a health crisis than an economic crisis, have been “very” or “somewhat” worried that they or a member of their family will be exposed to the coronavirus and are more concerned that businesses are reopening too quickly rather than too slowly.

Since Memorial Day, President Trump frequently said it was time to reopen the country and return to normal. He attacked governors who called for continued stay-at-home orders, and wavered on whether masks were necessary or effective.

However a spike in cases in sunbelt states like Florida and Texas led to a change in tone. In July, the president endorsed wearing a mask, after months of equivocating.

The U.S. is currently nearing 180,000 coronavirus deaths.

The NBC|SurveyMonkey poll tracks with other polling that shows the president’s base of support staying consistent. The latest NBC News/WSJ poll showed the president with a 44 percent job approval rating — the July NBC News/WSJ poll showed the president with a 42 percent job approval, and the NBC News/WSJ poll from the end of May into the beginning of June showed the president with 45 percent approval. All three of those polls were among registered voters.

The coronavirus pandemic will likely be a central point of the RNC. And in remarks to delegates on Monday in Charlotte, N.C., President Trump previewed one of the convention’s messages: Remember what things were like before coronavirus.

“We were going in a direction like we had never seen. The most successful economy in the history of our country,” Trump said.

He later added, “Hopefully we’ll call it the final phase of the pandemic.”

The data come from a set of SurveyMonkey online polls conducted August 17-23, 2020 among a national sample of 42,315 adults in the U.S. Respondents were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. The modeled error estimate for this survey is plus or minus 1.0 percentage points. Data have been weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States age 18 and over.