CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten offered Donald Trump’s critics “a bit of a reality check” on Friday as he argued that the president’s net favorability rating may have risen this week because he backed off on his tariffs.
Enten stressed that people were writing Trump’s “political obituary” in late April when he saw historically low polling near the 100th day of his second term. Polls at the time found a majority of Americans disapproved of his handling of the economy and tariffs.
Enten proceeded to argue that the recent jolt to Trump’s polling numbers could be due to the chance of a U.S. recession falling since late April, with J.P. Morgan lowering its forecast from 60% to less than 50% and Goldman Sachs dropping its figure from 45% to 35%.
“The bottom line is: It is the economy, the economy, the economy,” said Enten, noting that Trump’s trade wars somewhat “collapsed” due to a temporary truce on tariffs between the U.S. and China earlier this week.
“I do think that the voters are responding to this, and therefore we’re seeing Trump’s approval rating going up,” he told CNN’s John Berman.
“The tariffs were really hurting him, and he backed off, and it may be helping him politically now,” Berman said.
Enten replied, “Sometimes Donald Trump has some pretty good political instincts.”
Earlier in the program, Enten noted that Trump’s net approval rating among voters in a Reuters/Ipsos poll jumped from -8 percentage points on April 21 to -1 percentage point on Tuesday.
“This is not the picture that I think a lot of people were thinking that we would be painting,” Enten said.
He also turned to an aggregate of polls showing that Trump’s net approval rating is not only “considerably better” now (-6 percentage points) than it was in late April (-9 percentage points), but it’s also higher than it was at this point in his first term (-15 percentage points).