Why Trump is getting more popular

Much has changed since President-elect Donald Trump first entered the White House in 2017. Swaziland, the landlocked south African country, was renamed Eswatini; the Buffalo Bills made the NFL playoffs for the first time since 1999; the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by 71 million; and the musical "Wicked" got a theatrical release. And things changed for Trump, too: Now, one week before his inauguration to a second term as president of the United States, he's finally popular — or at least on the cusp of it.

According to 538's average of polls of Trump's favorability rating, 47.2 percent of American adults have a favorable view of the president-elect, compared to 47.4 percent who have an unfavorable view. That means his net favorability rating — the difference between these two numbers — is now the highest it has been since our tracking began on Jan. 30, 2021. It's also higher than his average net approval rating — a related but different metric that measured how many Americans approved of his job performance while he was president — was at any point after Feb. 2, 2017. Trump, in other words, is at or near an all-time high in popularity.

Trump's rising popularity since Election Day 2024 is particularly notable. He has gained roughly 8 percentage points of net favorability in the average poll since Nov. 5. The president-elect's net favorability was at -8.6 points then — around where he was for most of last year. An 8-point bounce is quite a feat in this day and age of stable public opinion; in all our tracking, Trump's post-November bounce is only really rivaled by the bump in Vice President Kamala Harris's favorability rating after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 election and she became the presumptive Democratic nominee.

So, what explains the rise in Trump's rating? The simplest answer is that a number of Trump's haters really have come around on him. Notably, Trump hasn't improved his standing among just one segment of the electorate; according to a comparison of YouGov/The Economist polling from before and after the election, the share of Americans rating Trump favorably has increased among every gender, race and age group except people age 65+ — and even among them, his favorable percentage has "declined" by only 1 point (from 49 percent to 48 percent), which could easily be attributable to random noise in the polling. Even Democrats now rate Trump better than they did before the election.

Why the uniform shift? Maybe the contrast with Biden, who has a -18-point net favorability rating in 538's average today, caused Americans to change their minds on the controversial Republican leader. Maybe the campaign reminded them of the pre-pandemic period of his presidency, in which the economy was generally good and inflation was stable; if you weren't a news junkie (and most Americans aren't), it frankly was easy to ignore some of the unpopular things he did during his term, such as his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And even for Americans who were paying attention to those things, it's possible the economic story resonates more with them in retrospect.

But even if this is true, it's worth questioning whether this is a permanent shift or just a temporary sugar high. It is easy, frankly, to see how the average American would approve of a president more after he scored a big win and when most of the negative aspects of his presidency are in the rearview mirror — at least for now. A post-election "honeymoon period" is common for newly elected presidents, including Trump in 2016 and 2017. In the two months after the 2016 election, Trump's net favorability rating increased 17 points (from -21 points to -4 points) only to fall back to negative double digits by May, according to an average of polls published by RealClearPolitics. In fact, compared with this bounce, Trump's current 8-point boost disappoints. According to RealClearPolitics, even Biden enjoyed a 7-point bounce after his win in 2020.

However, this is one of those theories that we cannot test without time-traveling. It is potentially convincing that Trump is being evaluated more generously now because of the post-election glow but that his ratings will fall once he assumes office and starts enacting policies and sucking up more oxygen. But only time can bear this theory out.

There is one final possible reason for Trump's apparent increase in popularity: that it is an illusion — the result of changes in either the way surveys are being conducted or who is answering them. After elections are over, pollsters often adjust their methods to do things like update their weights for the percent of Americans who vote for Democrats or Republicans, adjust quotas for certain demographics groups, etc.

However, I reached out to YouGov — the most prolific pollster active today — to ask if the change in their results was attributable to post-election changes in methodology, and the answer was mostly no: Even though they have updated some of their methods, they said they would have seen an increase in Trump's numbers even if they kept their methods constant. That doesn't rule out that other pollsters are generating phantom swings by updating their weights, of course. But on the other hand, the swing toward Trump shows up across multiple modes and pollsters, making it more likely the change in attitudes is actually real.

There is still the possibility that Trump's rising favorability rating is a product of changes in the partisan makeup of the group of people responding to polls. If Republicans are feeling emboldened by Trump's victory, or Democrats dejected by their defeat, it's possible the respondents pollsters are reaching are just inherently more Trump-friendly now than they were before November. Ultimately we cannot know for sure if this is happening, however, because we don't get to directly observe whether the people declining to answer polls are more anti-Trump than they were before.

So, based on the (imperfect) tools we have, it at least looks like Trump is more popular than he has been at any point since at least 2017. And Trump has seemed emboldened by this boost: His staff and surrogates have claimed a mandate to enact swift and comprehensive legislative change and fundamentally rework the administrative state.

But he should remember that similar boosts in the past have not lasted long. Trump's victory was in fact much smaller than his supporters have mythologized, and some of his promises — like that to pardon the people imprisoned on charges related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — are still very unpopular. If his favorability rating follows the usual track, and/or he attempts some of his more unpopular policies, Trump may find himself quickly at odds again with the American public.