A majority of Americans did not approve of the job President Donald Trump has been doing in every single poll conducted by NBC News/The Wall Street Journal since he took office.
Trump did not receive more than a 47 percent approval rating from U.S. adults at any point over the course of his presidency. Forty-one separate polls conducted by NBC/WSJ since February 2017 show he could never quite receive a majority of approval from Americans.
The final poll numbers released Sunday morning by the two aforementioned news outlets shows Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has a 10-point lead over Trump nationally and has 6-point leads across 12 battleground states.
A slim majority of Americans, 51 percent, said they would never consider voting for Trump on Election Day, compared to 40 percent who said the same of Biden.
"Over the course of his term, there have been 41 NBC/WSJ polls that have measured Donald Trump's performance as president," Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt told NBC News Sunday. "In those 41 polls, there was not a single poll that produced a result where more Americans approved than disapproved of his performance as president."
Trump has a median approval rating of 44 percent throughout his time as president, but he never cracked a majority of approval among Americans in every single poll. Trump's approval rating has hovered within the same 9-point range throughout his entire presidency—with his high of 47 percent coming in October 2018 and his low of 38 percent occurring in an October 2017 poll.
By comparison, former President Barack Obama had a median approval rating of 48 percent. He hit his high of 60 percent approval in April 2009 and his low of 40 percent in July 2014. Former President George W. Bush had a 51 percent median approval rating, although he reached an 88 percent approval rating right after the September 11, 2011 attacks—only to leave office in January 2009 with a 27 percent approval rating, by far the lowest of all recent presidents.
Trump currently holds positive approval from 45 percent of U.S. voters, up one percent from two weeks ago. But a majority of Americans—54 percent—disapprove of the job he's doing in the White House. The final NBC/WSJ poll numbers collected before Tuesday's election are overwhelmingly negative for Trump, or at least continuing to lag behind Biden as has been the case throughout much of the 2020 presidential campaign cycle.
One figure stands high above the rest for Trump: the U.S. economy. A 55 percent majority of Americans said they approve of his handling of the economy since taking office. But only 40 percent of respondents said they approve of how the president has dealt with the coronavirus pandemic. A sizable majority—57 percent—still said they disapprove of his response to the ongoing public health crisis.
The latest NBC/WSJ poll shows that a sizable majority of Americans—60 percent—believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, compared to fewer than one-third, 31 percent, who said the U.S. is "on the right track."
Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Biden campaigns for reaction Sunday morning.
