By Jason Lange
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Donald Trump’s presidential approval rating stood at 42% in recent days, with the president getting higher marks for his handling of crime and immigration versus the economy, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Tuesday.
The five-day poll, which surveyed 1,084 adults nationwide, also showed 56% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s presidential performance.
The poll included a slight change to its methodology relative to prior Reuters/Ipsos surveys, including one conducted Aug 22-24, no longer giving respondents the option to say they were “not sure” about whether they approved or disapproved of the president’s overall job performance. In that prior survey, 40% of respondents approved of the job Trump was doing and 54% disapproved.
Respondents in the latest poll retained the option not to answer the question. The change was not expected to have a meaningful effect on the findings of the poll, which has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points for all respondents.
Some 43% of survey respondents gave Trump a thumbs up on his handling of crime, and 42% said he was doing a good job on immigration, readings largely in line with those of the prior poll.
Trump in recent weeks has deployed federal agents and soldiers to the Democratic-run cities of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to clamp down on illegal immigration and, in the case of the country’s capital, to take over law enforcement even as crime rates overall have shrunk in recent years, leading to criticism by city’s Democratic leader and protesters.
On Monday, after vowing to send the National Guard to Chicago, the Trump administration said it launched a deportation crackdown in Illinois.
Trump gets relatively poor marks on his handling of the economy, with 36% of Americans liking his economic stewardship and just 30% backing his handling of the cost of living for U.S. households. The U.S. job market is looking increasingly shaky, with a report on Tuesday showing the U.S. economy likely created 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than previously estimated, a sign that job growth was stalling even before Trump started raising taxes on imports after he returned to the White House.
(Reporting by Jason Lange; editing by Scott Malone)
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