Dead-Enders and Die-Hards Wish Obama Was Still President

The Resistance continues! As zombie Newsweek reports:

With every early morning tweet about North Korea, every new scoop related to the Russia scandal and every businessman who gets hired (then fired) from the White House, Barack Obama looks just a little bit better than President Donald Trump.

Fifty-two percent of respondents to a Public Policy Polling survey released Thursday said they wished Obama was still leading the U.S., compared to 41 percent who said they preferred having Trump in office. The Obama fandom was dominated by voters who supported Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, but they weren’t alone. Some 7 percent of Trump voters—and 14 percent of self-identified Republicans—also chose Obama over the current commander in chief.

The Obama nostalgia is real, especially because Trump’s approval ratings are so low—about 39 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. The poll was also full of Trump criticisms: 54 percent of people said he was dishonest, 47 percent said he was mentally unstable and 48 percent said he should be impeached.

“We’re really not seeing any path to Donald Trump achieving a positive approval rating,” the polling group’s president, Dean Debnam, said in a news release. “Voters are unhappy with him about a lot of ongoing issues, and new ones seem to creep up in our polling every month as well.”

Trump’s current approval rating, the Real Clear Politics averages, is 40 percent. But so what? The next election will come in November 2020, and until then approval ratings are just curiosities. What matters now is policy: rolling back regulations, judicial appointments, dealing with North Korea and Iran. If the president gets those things right, watch his approval ratings soar at the only time and place they matter: at the ballot box during the 2020 election.