President Donald Trump’s highest approval rating is in Alabama, a poll released Tuesday suggests.
The survey by Morning Consult, is based on interviews with 802,543 registered voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The company has updated its survey results each month since Trump took office. The most recent Alabama results have a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
The president’s approval rating in Alabama was 63 percent, virtually unchanged from the Morning Consult survey taken in January 2017. Some 33 percent of Alabamians disapproved of the job Trump is doing, for a net approval of 30 points.
Trump’s lowest Alabama rating was in June, when he was 14 percentage points above water.
That net approval of 30 percentage points tops second-place Wyoming by 5 points and third-place West Virginia by 8 points. The approval rating is significantly higher than exit polls taken during the December special election for the U.S. Senate. Those surveys showed Trump’s net positive rating was just 1 percentage point.
The improvement probably is due to a combination of two factors. The president is more popular in Alabama than he was in December; the Morning Consult poll showed he has improved his position by 4 points since its December survey. In addition, the exit survey captured only voters who turned out for the election, and there are plenty of indications that turnout skewed Democrat in that race.
That Alabama is Trump’s best state is no surprise. But it ranks even higher than in the 2016 election, when Trump got a higher share of the vote in Wyoming, West Virginia, North Dakota and Kentucky.
Buoyed by passage of a landmark tax-reform law, an improving economy and a well-received State of the Union speech, Trump has improved his standing in most states. His approval rating nationally was 44 percent, up 4 points since October.
But Trump remains under water, with 51 percent disapproving. And he remains deeply unpopular in many of the states he lost in 2016.
In D.C., 80 percent of voters disapprove of the president, with just 16 percent approving. He is more unpopular there than any state. Vermont, land of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Hawaii are tied with a 36-point net disapproval.
Since September, Trump’s standing has improved the most in New Hampshire, jumping 9 points. He approval is 7 points better than in September in Virginia and Georgia.
On the flip side, his approval declined by 14 points in Utah. That’s the biggest drop in the country, followed by New Mexico and Alaska.
Brendan Kirby is senior political reporter at LifeZette.com and a Yellowhammer contributor. He also is the author of “Wicked Mobile.” Follow him on Twitter.
