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DON’T PRAISE IN ADVANCE: A CURE FOR MAD SURRENDER DISEASE  
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Michael Podhorzer
February 4, 2025
Weekend Reading
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_ It’s standard to think of presidents’ initial approval ratings;
it’s also worth looking at presidential disapproval ratings. Here,
Trump really stands out. He now has the highest beginning disapproval
in the record by a substantial margin. _

,

 

In his essential _On Tyranny [[link removed]]_,
Timothy Snyder warns us not to “obey in advance” if we want to
defend ourselves from impending tyranny. To that admonition, I would
add _“DON’T PRAISE IN ADVANCE” – DON’T TAKE AT FACE VALUE
THE MEDIA HERD NOW TELLING US THAT TRUMP AND HIS AGENDA ARE MORE
POPULAR THAN THEY ACTUALLY ARE, LEST IT BECOME A SELF-FULFILLING
PROPHECY._

As I wrote in _How Trump “Won
[[link removed]]_,” despite the rush
to see Trump’s election as sweeping or historic, it was, in fact,
one of the narrowest wins ever. I further argued that what was
remarkable was that, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the
direction of the country and the performance of the Democratic
administration, Trump came as close to losing as he did.

It was especially telling that most of the “swing” from 2020 to
2024 was how many fewer votes Harris received than Biden had, and that
about 70 percent of that drop
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in the Bluest places in America. In all, according to VoteCast, about
19 million1
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who voted for Biden in 2020 stayed home in 2024.

Some have speculated
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the drop in support for Democrats by Blue county voters was actually
about their warming to the MAGA program, albeit not enough to bother
voting for Trump. But a closer look at 538’s average
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Trump’s post-inaugural approval ratings offers more evidence that
Trump and his agenda have not, in fact, grown more popular with
Americans.

Political analysts usually talk about presidents enjoying a “bump”
in popularity after they are elected, as voters who merely preferred
the winner’s opponent (as opposed to actively disliking the winner)
come on board after Election Day, most likely hoping for the best. In
that regard, it’s telling that Trump’s approval rating is no
better than his share of the vote three months ago.

While it’s standard to think of presidents’ initial approval
ratings, it’s also very much worth looking at
presidential _DISAPPROVAL _ratings. And here, Trump really stands
out. He now has the highest beginning disapproval in the record by a
substantial margin.

But, now, let’s take that a step further, to look at what I’ll
name the “Receptivity Margin.” By that I mean the difference
between the percentage of people who voted against the president on
Election Day, and the percentage of people who register disapproval in
surveys.2
[[link removed]] If
the Biden voters who stayed home were, in fact, doing so because they
were Trump-curious, that should definitely show up here. But as the
next graph makes clear, the receptivity margin has never been as small
as it is now for Trump – and by a lot.

[[link removed]]Now
remember: The universal consensus going into the election, and since,
has been that Harris was more popular with those who voted (or were
more likely to vote) than those who didn’t (or were less likely to
vote). Nary a pre-election piece didn’t warn of the disaster
awaiting Democrats if too many people voted, and many post-election
analyses argued that greater turnout wouldn’t have helped Harris.
Their argument was essentially that those who were most disapproving
of Trump were the most likely to vote, which, of course, means that
those who were less likely to vote were less disapproving of Trump.
Furthermore, they argued that this was a noteworthy reversal when, in
previous cycles, it has been taken for granted that those less likely
to vote were also more likely to vote for the Democrat.

Now, if that argument were true, we would expect, _ex ante_, that
Trump’s receptivity margin would be greater than it had been for
previous presidents. (Approval ratings include non-voters) But the
opposite is true. In reality, we see the lowest receptivity margin on
record, even lower than in 2016.

The abstention of 19 million Biden 2020 voters should be understood as
a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not a yearning for Trump or the
MAGA agenda. Indeed, while there are always many factors at play, lack
of alarm about the dangers of a second Trump Administration – a
credulity gap – clearly mattered. Those who didn’t vote for Harris
(including people who didn’t vote at all) were much less likely
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believe Trump would actually implement the agenda that he and his
allies promised.

So, here we are again. The only way to convince yourself that 2024 was
about “America moved right!” is to live in the ”Flatland
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polling simulacrum, where unfalsifiable claims run wild and where
it’s easy to claim that the arithmetic impact of abstention is
actually affirmation.

Again, as I wrote [[link removed]]:

The defining feature of American politics this century is
that _NEITHER PARTY CAN “WIN” ELECTIONS ANYMORE; THEY CAN ONLY BE
THE “NOT-LOSER.” _Only thanks to the two-party system can the
not-loser be crowned the “winner,” since there is no way to fire
the incumbent party without hiring the opposition party. _YET
POLITICAL COMMENTATORS KEEP CONFUSING SHIFTS IN THE TWO PARTIES’
ELECTORAL FORTUNES WITH CHANGES IN VOTERS’ BASIC VALUES OR
PRIORITIES._ A collapse in support for Democrats does not mean that
most Americans, especially in Blue America
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suddenly eager to live in an illiberal theocracy.

Consider that only once before in American history have three
consecutive presidential elections seen the White House change
partisan hands, and that _NINE OUT OF THE LAST TEN MIDTERM OR
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS HAVE BEEN “CHANGE ELECTIONS_,” in the sense
that either the presidency, the House, or the Senate changed partisan
hands, which is completely unprecedented.

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In short, Americans are fed up
[[link removed]]. _THIS
ELECTION WASN’T JUST A VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN DEMOCRATS; IT WAS
YET ANOTHER VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE IN OUR ENTIRE POLITICAL SYSTEM. _We
cannot mistake this result for an active embrace of Trump or MAGA
fascism.

_Michael Podhorzer is former political director of the AFL-CIO. Senior
fellow at the Center for American Progress. Founder: Analyst
Institute, Research Collaborative (RC). He publishes Weekend Reading.
(weekendreading.net [[link removed]])_

_Weekend Reading is edited by Emily Crockett, with research assistance
by Andrea Evans and Thomas Mande._

1
[[link removed]] According
to VoteCast data
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40 percent of those voting in 2024 had voted for Biden in 2020, and 40
percent had voted for Trump. 40 percent of 155 million ballots cast in
2024 = 62 million Biden voters. Those 62 million are 19 million less
than voted for Biden in 2020. Of course, we’ll have no way of
knowing exactly how accurate the VoteCast estimate is until all of the
voter files are updated, sometime in March. However, since I
wrote _How Trump “Won,”
[[link removed]]_ voter files in 18
states representing about a third of all votes cast, report that 83
percent of those voting in 2024 voted in 2020, just one point more
than VoteCast’s estimate of 82 percent. (AZ, CO, DE, GA, IA, LA, MI,
MT, NC, ND, NE, NJ, NV, OH, OK, RI, WA and WI)

2
[[link removed]] If
you read How Trump “Won,”
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think that we are much better served by looking at election results
through the framework of what I call 3D-Land, in which Trump received
the support of 32 percent of eligible voters, Harris received 31
percent, and 37 percent did not cast ballots. (As opposed to what I
called Flatland – the way results are universally reported, as a
share of either all votes cast or as a percentage of votes cast for
the two parties. That produces the more familiar 49.8 to 48.3 result
(all votes) or 50.8 to 49.2 (two-party)).

By definition, there is no 3D-Land in polling. First, at the
theoretical level, not voting and not taking a survey are two
different things. When someone takes a survey, they do not know that
they will be asked their approval of the president in the way that
someone deciding whether to vote knows that they are casting a ballot
for president.

Second, election results are a census of people who voted. Surveys are
a weighted combination of results. In an election, everyone counts as
1, while in a survey, whether your opinion counts as more or less than
1 depends on whether you belong to a demographically defined category
that the pollster thinks is under or over represented in the
interviews they collected.

Third, we know that those taking surveys are much more likely to have
strong opinions than those who don’t, which makes common sense and
is routinely validated. That’s especially true for online surveys
where respondents regularly take surveys. When I was at the AFL-CIO,
when we did online surveys of the general public, we added a question
of how many surveys you had taken in the last six months, and found
that for a substantial portion of the sample, that was a dozen or
more. (This is a serious flaw in online surveys about issues, etc.,
but that’s for another time.)

All of which is why it’s important that this exercise is about
comparing across time rather than trying to get a precise measure of
something today. In other words, after that long windup, I hope you
can see that while knowing the exact percentage of the population
receptive to Trump is elusive and easily debatable, that it is so much
less than previous presidents at this point in their term is not
remotely debatable. (This is also why, for newer readers, at Weekend
Reading you won’t find tables of numbers, but visualizations,
wherever possible. I do that because it’s usually the case that if a
point can’t be made through visualizations, it’s likely that
asserted differences depend on debatable assumptions or methodological
margins of error. Estimates presented numerically, especially if they
have a decimal point, unconsciously convey unsubstantiated precision.)

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