Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Fifty percent (50%) disapprove.

The latest figures include 37% who Strongly Approve of the way Trump is performing and 40% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -3. (see trends).

Regular updates are posted Monday through Friday at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update).

Forty-six percent (46%) of voters think the country is heading in the right direction. This is the fourth week in a row that this finding has been in the mid-40s after running in the mid- to upper 20s for much of 2016.

Voters have long complained that President Obama was not sending illegal immigrants home fast enough. Now with Trump in the White House, they’re worried that too many people are being deported. 

The president is expected as soon as today to authorize the hiring of thousands of new ICE and Border Patrol officers and to put the deportation of criminal aliens on the fast track. Eighty-one percent (81%) of voters favor a plan that calls for mandatory deportation of illegal immigrants who have been convicted of a felony in this country.

Fifty-two percent (52%) still believe the federal government should cut off funds to cities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and provide sanctuary for illegal immigrants. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

The president last week broke with long-standing U.S. foreign policy position and said the creation of a separate Palestinian state is not essential to a Middle East peace agreement. We’ll tell you how voters feel about that at 10:30.

(More below)

Most voters think Russia is a likely influence on the president’s foreign policy but also tend to see critics of fallen National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as more interested in scoring political points than in U.S. national security.

If the president moves ahead with a major federal plan to rebuild infrastructure in the United States, most Americans don't think they should have to pay any extra taxes to fund it.

Nearly one-in-four Americans (23%) rate the safety of infrastructure – roads, bridges, dams, tunnels and the like – as poor in the area where they live. 

(More below)

Some readers wonder how we come up with our job approval ratings for the president since they often don’t show as dramatic a change as some other pollsters do. It depends on how you ask the question and whom you ask.

To get a sense of longer-term job approval trends for the president, Rasmussen Reports compiles our tracking data on a full month-by-month basis.

Rasmussen Reports has been a pioneer in the use of automated telephone polling techniques, but many other firms still utilize their own operator-assisted technology (see methodology).

Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. To reach those who have abandoned traditional landline telephones, Rasmussen Reports uses an online survey tool to interview randomly selected participants from a demographically diverse panel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters is +/- 2.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Results are also compiled on a full-week basis and crosstabs for full-week results are available for Platinum Members.