Poll: Majority of Republicans Think Trump Is a Better President Than Abraham Lincoln

With First Lady Melania Trump looking on, President Donald Trump speaks before giving the National Thanksgiving Turkey Butter a presidential pardon in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on Nov. 26, 2019. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

A survey has found that a majority of Republicans believe President Donald Trump is a better leader than Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president whose face is emblazoned on the $5 bill and penny.

A Economist/YouGov weekly tracking poll found that 53 percent of surveyed Republicans thought Trump was better while 47 percent believed it was still Lincoln, underscoring just how popular Trump is among his voter base less than a year before the 2020 election.

Overall, 75 percent of Americans thought Lincoln was the better president, but the poll suggests that amid the impeachment inquiry led by House Democrats, Trump is still maintaining a very strong approval rating among Republicans.

“And the Do Nothing Democrats want to impeach President Trump?” he wrote on Twitter over the weekend, including a link of the news story about the poll results.

Earlier this year, Trump spoke of his popularity among Republicans.

“You know, a poll just came out that I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party,” Trump said in a July interview with The Sun tabloid.

“Beating Lincoln,” Trump said at the time. “I beat our Honest Abe.”

Former President Ronald Reagan remains Republicans’ most beloved president, beating Trump 59 percent to 41 percent in terms of favorability.

The Economist/YouGov poll surveyed 1,500 Americans from Nov. 24 to Nov. 26. It has a 2.8-percent margin or error.

More Poll Results

Meanwhile, approval for President Trump increase to 34.5 percent among black registered voters in a recent Emerson poll.

The number is notable because only 8 percent of blacks voted for Trump in 2016, according to Cornell University’s Roper Center.

The Emerson poll of 1,092 registered voters was conducted Nov. 17 to Nov. 20, partly by automated landline calls and partly online. The same poll taken a month earlier showed approval for Trump’s presidency at 17.8 percent among blacks.

The pollster warns that results for subsets of voters have a higher margin of error than the 2.9 percentage points the poll has as a whole. For black voters, the margin is 8.3 percent, according to Spencer Kimball, assistant professor at Emerson College who oversees the polling.

In November, Emerson interviewed 153 black voters, compared with 140 in October. There were slightly more Republicans in the November group (13.1 percent versus 10.2 percent in October). But there were also more Democrats (69.5 percent vs 64.1 percent).

“There was no change to the methodology,” Kimball said in an email to The Epoch Times. “This could be attributed to variance within the subsets … and be an anomaly, or it could be the start of a trend. … I have noticed [Trump’s] approval with minority voters slightly higher than his 2016 vote totals and think he might do better with this vote than he did in 2016.”

Petr Svab contributed to this report.