Alabama again is President Donald Trump’s most supportive state, according to a Morning Consult survey released Wednesday.
The poll, conducted in May, indicates that 63 percent of Alabama voters approve of Trump’s performance. That edges Wyoming and West Virginia, where the president’s approval rating stood at 62 percent.
With 33 percent of Alabama voters disapproving of the president’s job performance, Trump’s net approval is 30 percentage points. That also is Trump’s highest in the country.
Trump’s approval rating in Alabama is actually a percentage point higher than it was in a Morning Consult poll in January 2017, when he took office. But his disapproval rating shot up 7 points since then.
Still, Trump’s net approval rating has declined by just 6 points, which is tied with Louisiana for the least erosion in the country.
All of this it to say that Alabama remains Trump country. That should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed Trump’s rise to power. Alabama was the site of, perhaps, his most important early rally — a raucous event in Mobile on a sweltering summer night in 2015.
At the time, Trump had been leading Republican primary polls for several weeks. But it was months before anyone has actually voted, and most experts still were dismissing his candidacy as a vanity project destined to flame out when the electorate grew serious.
But Trump electrified the crowd in Mobile and never looked back. He eventually picked up the support of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the first sitting senator to endorse Trump. Trump went one to swamp the Republican field in the Alabama primary.
Alabama and West Virginia have traded places over the past year as Trump’s best state. A Morning Consult poll four months ago, for instance, suggested Alabama was No. 1, but the Heart of Dixie gave up the title the following month.
After Alabama, West Virginia and Wyoming, Trump fared best in Louisiana (60 percent approval) and Mississippi (59 percent).
Not surprisingly, the District of Columbia gave Trump his lowest marks last month. The president got just 4 percent of the vote in the nation’s capital in 2016; according to Morning Consult, 77 percent last month disapproved of his performance.
Some 61 percent of voters view Trump negatively in Vermont, Hawaii and Massachusetts. Rhode Island comes in one tick below, at 60 percent.
@BrendanKKirby is a senior political reporter at LifeZette and author of “Wicked Mobile.”
Don’t miss out! Subscribe today to have Alabama’s leading headlines delivered to your inbox.