For the first time since April, President Trump’s approval ratings for his handling of the coronavirus appear to have stopped falling and even rose slightly, suggesting he has turned a corner for the time being, according to new findings by researchers from Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern and Rutgers. The president’s pandemic approval numbers have hovered in the low 30s since the researchers began tracking them earlier in the year. But the sixth in a rolling series of national surveys taken Aug. 7-26 showed a slight uptick to 35 percent.
“It is more than a statistical anomaly because he was definitely going down every month before this,” says David Lazer, university distinguished professor of political science and computer and information sciences at Northeastern, and one of the researchers who conducted the study. “We can say with confidence that he did not go down and that given the size of our sample, he probably did go up slightly.”
