For 88 Years, One Number Graded US Presidents. Now It’s Going Away.

“Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?”

For 88 years, some version of that question has provided presidents a regular report card on their performance. Frank Newport, a senior scientist at Gallup Inc. — steward of this civic metric since the Franklin D. Roosevelt era — once called it “arguably the most important time series in US polling history and likely the most well-understood public opinion measure in popular American culture.”