Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:
Yes, I used the same term that Tam did, which is sort of the flashing yellow lights here for Trump and for Republicans.
Look, we have seen a couple of things in these last few weeks. The first is a drop in consumer confidence that’s being captured in a number of different surveys. And then we see, like this Marist poll, that the president’s overall approval rating on the economy is in more negative territory than positive territory.
And that’s not usually where Donald Trump is. If you go back and you look at the Marist poll from the summer of 2018, which was the last time that this poll asked about these issues while Trump was in office, so there wasn’t any data from 2017, but, at this point in 2018, opinions about Trump overall were much lower, opinions about his handling of immigration, his handling of foreign policy much lower than they are now.
But his opinion the economy, how well he was handling the economy, much higher back in 2018 than it is today. And I think a lot of it is driven by the fact that there are so many voters out there, especially independent voters, who voted for Donald Trump with the really emphasis on his ability to lower prices and to focus on the economy.
And that’s one other number that has been showing up. This one was a CBS poll from this weekend; 80 percent of voters saying inflation is the top issue for me. And yet only 29 percent think that Donald Trump is focused on that issue.
