By
Eli Yokley
July 26, 2018 at 3:21 pm ET
New Poll Suggests Voters Have Made Up Their Minds on What Trump Is Like
But the share who described Trump as a strong leader rose
President Donald Trump. (Olivier Douliery - Pool/Getty Images)
43% of voters describe Trump as a strong leader, up 4 points since January, while 46% disagree.
63% of Republicans said the word “honest” described the president, down 9 points since January.
After a tumultuous first half of the year for President Donald Trump – featuring the emergence of new details about alleged past affairs, developments in the Russia probe and critiques of his foreign policy – voters’ views about him personally have hardly changed, suggesting many have made up their minds about the nation’s 45th leader.
And voters’ opinions are not complimentary: Fifty-nine percent of voters describe Trump as reckless, while 45 percent – a plurality – describe him as thin-skinned. Nearly half (49 percent) said they wouldn’t describe Trump as having integrity, while a 45 percent plurality describe him as corrupt.
The latest survey, which polled 1,996 registered voters, also found 45 percent approve of Trump, while 51 percent disapprove — figures which fall within the survey’s 2 point margin of error compared to January.
But voters did reconsider one attribute in the past six months: In the latest poll from July 19-23 — conducted after Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and meetings with European leaders — the share of respondents who described Trump as a strong leader rose 4 percentage points, to 43 percent, compared to a January poll.
More than 3 in 4 Republican voters (76 percent) describe Trump as a strong leader, the same share who said so in January.
Among Republicans, the biggest change came when they were asked if Trump is honest. Sixty-three percent of Republicans said that word describes the president, down 6 points since January, while the share among all voters dropped 3 points to 32 percent.
Republicans and voters overall were most likely to disagree on the question of whether Trump “cares about people like me.” A third of all voters said Trump does — less than half the 69 percent of Republicans who said so.
But – like questions of whether Trump keeps his promises, or is racist or sexist – those views appear to be baked in, with hardly any change compared to January.
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