President-elect Donald Trump now has a net-positive favorability rating for the first time since he entered politics.
Americans have finally flipped on Trump for the first time since he first toyed with entering politics back in 1999: 49.4 percent now have a favorable view of the president-elect, compared to 47.4 percent who have an unfavorable view, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.
Back in September 1999, when Trump first began talking about running for president, he had a negative favorability rating, with 47 percent of Americans having a negative opinion of him, compared to 41 percent who had a positive opinion.
Over the past several years, Trump has slowly worked his way up from a 35 percent favorability for much of his first presidential campaign to 40 percent during his first term.
Even this campaign was different, with Trump enjoying 45 percent approval ratings. Many events over the past several months have seemingly turned the tide in the former and future president’s favor, including the two failed assassination attempts against him and the several criminal cases he faced, which he dismissed as politically motivated.
One need to look no further than the results on Election Day to see that public perception of Trump had changed. He won the popular vote for the first time, with 49.9 percent to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 48.4 percent. Trump also carried 312 electoral college votes to Harris’s 226.
Trump was buoyed by increased support among Latino and black men.
Early exit polling from CNN found Harris with a margin of victory of just 8 percentage points among Hispanic voters, compared to the 38-point advantage Hillary Clinton enjoyed from the same voting bloc in 2016 and a 33-point lead notched by Joe Biden four years ago.
The president-elect, who won among Latino men by ten points according to CNN exit polling, is the first Republican candidate to do so in the time that exit polling has existed, according to the network’s Harry Enten.
Trump also did surprisingly well in several blue states, again boosted by heavily Hispanic areas.
In New Jersey, the vice president won with just 51.2 percent of the vote, compared with Biden’s 57.1 percent of the vote in 2020. Passaic County, which is about 43 percent Latino, flipped from Democrat +17 in 2020 to Republican +3 this cycle.
And in New York, Harris led Trump by just 11.4 percent of the vote — the smallest margin for a Democratic presidential candidate in the Empire State since 1988. In the heavily Hispanic Bronx, Trump won 35 percent more votes this year than in 2020. He also enjoyed a massive boost of support in Queens (16.5 percent) and Manhattan (20 percent) as well.