Trump Boasts Approval Ratings With African Americans Have Doubled (They Have Not)

[DonViejo]

Source: Mediate




by Ken Meyer | 12:18 pm, January 16th, 2018

President Donald Trump got back on Twitter this morning, and at one point, he issued a bit of misleading information about a supposed boost in his approval ratings.

The president got the most out of his “Executive Time” today, issuing statements about several of his favorite talking points. (Many of these subjects came up on today’s Fox & Friends, in case you were wondering)

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

One tweet that stood out though was this:

Link to tweet

As quite a few responders on Twitter pointed out, the president’s approval rates among African Americans have not doubled, and they’re actually still quite low:

Link to tweet

-snip-

Link to tweet

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/online/trump-boasts-approval-ratings-with-african-americans-have-doubled-they-have-not/

[bluescribbler]

1. 1% to 2%?

[lamp_shade]

2. Bureau of Labor Stats shows differently (re black unemployment)

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000006

[Fred Sanders]

4. Thanks to President Obama! Clearly. Good site and chart.

[Saviolo]

8. Daniel Dale has been checking this "fact" for days, now:

Link to tweet

As Trump keeps emphasizing the record-low black unemployment, worth recalling: the rate went from 12.7% to 7.8% under Obama. It has gone from 7.8% to 6.8% under Trump.

[davekriss]

12. Eek! It is the lowest since 1972

6.8% now. I don’t see anything lower in the available data at that website. (It pains me to say.) Although it’s clearly a continuation of the favorable trajectory established by President Obama.

[wobblie]

25. favorable trajectory of people dropping out of job market

Under Bill Clinton (1994) they changed the methodology used to compute the UI numbers. The only reason the UI rate has declined is because fewer and fewer Americans are participating in the labor market. The Government has been using misleading numbers for UI for over 20 years. Economist know that we need to add over 200,000 new jobs to the economy every month to provide employment to those entering the job market. 148000 jobs last month. Check out the economy, stock market watch for good economic links

[progree]

26. Where did you get that info? Sounds like ZeroHedge stuff

# Myth: In 1994, during the Clinton administration, they stopped counting the long-term unemployed, or the "long term discouraged worker". If we calculated the unemployment rate now the way we did before 1994, the unemployment rate would be double, triple (or whatever. One claimed that the unemployment rate in January 2015 calculated by the old method would be 23% instead of the officially reported 5.7%). This official government document describes the changes made during the Clinton administration: http://www.bls.gov/mlr/1995/10/art3full.pdf

# Facts: First, the changes described in the above document actually increased the official unemployment rate (today's U-3) by about 0.2 percentage points (compared to the old official unemployment rate, then called U-5).

The big changes were in the more lenient alternative definitions of unemployment. The one that is most popular in the media both in the old days and the new days is the most lenient of the alternative ones -- U-7 in the old survey, and U-6 in the new one. (The other alternative measures barely seem to get any attention outside of academia).

Per that document, the definition change of discouraged workers cut the number of officially counted discouraged workers by about 50% in the new U-6 compared to the old U-7, and also decreased the number of part-time workers for economic reasons (part-time workers who want full time work) by about 20%.

I tried to emulate the old U-7 with today's data (well, this was back in early February 2015 using the January 2015 jobs report data) (I doubled the number of marginal workers and increased the part-time for economic reasons by 20%) and found it to be at most 13.4% (I made some simplifications that result in a high-side estimate), compared to the current U-6 at 11.3% (again these are January 2015 jobs reports numbers). So it's not like there is a humongous dramatic difference between the old measure and the new on this most lenient of the measures.

(January's official unemployment rate (U-3) and alternatives (U-1 thru U-6) are in Table A-15 in http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf )

( Definitions of alternative measures of unemployment: http://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm )

Anyway, its worth emphasizing again that the official unemployment rate (now U-3) was barely altered, actually slightly increased, compared to the old U-5 official definition. And that the changes did not all that dramatically reduce U-6 compared to its old survey U-7 counterpart.

Even counting everyone who says they want a job, period (including part-time workers who want full-time work), the January unemployment rate was 13.5%, based on Paul Solman's U-7 number for the January 2015 jobs report, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/higher-unemployment-rate-may-good-news-economy/ . Update: for September 2016, Paul's U-7 number is 12.0, and the BLS's U-6 number is 9.7%)

More detail about the 1994 Clinton era changes: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141009906#post67

[progree]

27. "Economist know that we need to add over 200,000 new jobs to the economy every month

to provide employment to those entering the job market."

What economists "know that"?

Hell, the civilian non-institutional population age 16-64 has declined by 115,000 in the past 12 months
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210065918#post5

Some people make an enormous thing about older people working longer than they used to, but the LFPR of this age 65+ group is still a low 19.0% (Dec'17) compared to 62.7% for the age 16+ group. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNU01300097

[former9thward]

20. What is different?

Your link shows it at the lowest.

[lamp_shade]

22. Yes... but notice the trend line since 2010. Thanks Obama.

[progree]

23. Here's the graph starting from 1972 (the earliest date this statistic was recorded)

in case anyone wants a quick look without going to the link and changing the start date from 2007 back to 1972:



The lowest I see in the table (until this December at 6.8%) is April 2000 at 7.0%.

[TheCowsCameHome]

3. A real tsunami, eh?

[Journeyman]

5. Yeah, but after Omarosa was fired the number was halved . . .

[onetexan]

7. whose the other half? Cheriff Clark?

[Native]

6. Zero times 2 is still zero, so technically he's correct.

[procon]

9. Whoever is feeding Trump all this disinformation, must be a Dem mole.

It's just reinforcing the image of an ignorant man who isn't very well read, and has no knowledge about the real stats put out by his own government.

[0rganism]

10. 0% to 0%: a 5000% increase

[packman]

11. Stable Genius Math Wiz

2 x 3 = 6

Well, hell's bells, that's a improvement of enormous proportions. Guy should have been an accountant. Gotta love Republican math.

[FSogol]

13. His rate of lies (Lies per Minute) is speeding up. Soon he'll be running at 55 LPM.

[George II]

18. Are you lost?

[SFnomad]

19. Removed and posting privileges revoked ...

That was the "person's" first post ... welcome to DU, eh?

[Zambero]

15. He may be correct this time, at least mathematically

Double ZERO = ZERO. Triple, or quadruple for that matter. Still a goose egg.

[Gothmog]

16. No, Trumps approval among black Americans hasnt doubled

From the Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/01/16/no-trumps-approval-among-black-americans-hasnt-doubled/?utm_term=.86897a027534

Any objective observer who is at all familiar with poll numbers would see Munro’s article for what it is. Then there’s Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade.

On Tuesday morning’s “Fox and Friends,” the hosts were discussing a survey showing that most 2017 coverage of Trump’s presidency was negative. Kilmeade interjected with some good news.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “through all this negative coverage, they did a survey of 600,000 people about how black America views this president. His numbers have actually doubled in approval. It’s still low, it’s around 25 percent, but it’s doubled since the election.”

Okay. So. First of all, they didn’t do a survey of 600,000 black Americans. Second of all, Kilmeade clearly thinks that saying “600,000” adds heft to the results, which, as we noted above, it doesn’t. Third, Trump’s approval numbers haven’t doubled, for the reasons above — and then some.

Approval numbers necessarily start only when a president takes office; after all, how are you going to evaluate the job performance of someone who doesn’t yet hold a job? Gallup has asked Americans their views of Trump’s job as president since his first week in office, allowing us to compare approval ratings among black Americans from the earliest point to the most recently available ratings (through the end of 2017).

Trump’s approval among black Americans fell nine points from January to December. Rather than doubling, his approval rating among those Americans was actually more than cut in half, dropping from 15 percent to 6 percent.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1484

[Hortensis]

17. Lol. Rump's wishful message's actually good for a chuckle.

[Cold War Spook]

21. He wants Black unemployment to be 0%

Like it used to be.

[sarcasmo]

24. Lying all the time, and reporters need to start calling out lies on TV.