Trump Approval Climbs Above 50 Percent After RNC, Poll Shows

President Donald Trump delivers his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination on the South Lawn of the White House on Aug. 27, 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

A slight majority of American likely voters approved of President Donald Trump’s performance in the days following the Republican National Convention (RNC), according to an Epoch Times Big Data Poll.

While 44.3 percent approved of Trump’s job in the part of the survey conducted during the convention from Aug. 26 to Aug. 28, the approval rose to 50.3 percent if counting only the responses collected from Aug. 28 to Aug. 30, from the day the convention concluded and after.

The RNC featured a roster of prominent Republican speakers, new faces from the Republican Party, and small-business owners, among others. The event culminated in a nomination acceptance speech delivered by Trump on the South Lawn of the White House and fireworks over the National Mall.

The same poll also showed that after the RNC, Trump wiped out a lead his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, held against him.

The trend reversed from a nine-point lead (47–38) for Biden during the convention into a two-point lead for Trump (46–44).

“The question remains whether it was a bump or a prolonged shift,” Rich Baris, director of Big Data Poll, told The Epoch Times via email.

With all five polling days combined, Trump’s job approval stood at 46.1 percent.

The support was strongest among rural Americans at 55.3 percent; union members at 53.1 percent; married couples at 52 percent; whites at 51.8 percent; those above 65 years at 51.5 percent; and men at 51.4 percent.

Trump fared the poorest among students at 25.3 percent; black likely voters at 27.8 percent; Asians and other races at 31.5 percent; single people at 33.9 percent; unemployed and those looking for work at 35.2 percent; self-described moderates at 35.2 percent; Hispanics at 37 percent; and those earning under $30,000 a year at 38.9 percent.

The support among blacks is quite significant as this demographic has for decades voted near-uniformly Democrat. The poll showed more than 12 percent of black likely voters saying they would vote for Trump. If that materializes on Election Day, it would be the best result for a Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The poll results were weighted based on gender, age, race, education, and region. The partisan affiliation breakdown was 36 percent Democrat, 32 percent Republican, and 32 percent independent/other, mirroring the Aristotle national voter file database.

For the survey, Big Data Poll interviewed 2,169 likely voters nationwide sourced via voter file-verified online survey panels from Aug. 26 to Aug. 30. The sampling error is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence interval projecting the electorate at 145 million.

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Read: Full Survey Results (pdf)