The Brazilian data analytics and polling firm AtlasIntel has well-deservedly garnered quite a lot of attention during the 2024 US presidential election. For the third election cycle in a row, they have been the most accurate firm polling a US election on the national level.
After nailing the 2020 presidential election (overestimated Democrat Joe Biden by 0.2 points) and the 2022 generic ballot vote in the House election (overestimated Republicans by 0.3 points), they managed to stay within their very narrow margin of error, and showed President Trump 1.1 points ahead Vice President Kamala Harris in the head-to-head contest and 1.2 ahead of her in the full field. President Trump ended up winning the popular vote by 1.48 points, so AtlasIntel’s miss was again just 0.3 points, underestimating President Trump again this time—these folks are scary accurate!
Their latest approval rating for President Trump is split evenly at 50–50 between approving and disapproving. That is pretty much in line with the RealClearPoltics’ aggregate for the POTUS, which stands at 48.6 per cent approving and 47.4 per cent disapproving.
However, an interesting tidbit in AtlasIntel’s latest polling data release caught the attention of the X user OpenSourceZone.
President Trump’s favourability also stands at 50 per cent, which is three points higher than President Obama’s, which stands at 47 per cent. President Obama has received widely different coverage from the mainstream media than President Trump throughout his political career. Barack Obama is typically held in high regard by members of the press and academia in the US; while Trump has always had to deal with almost universally negative publicity from the biggest media outlets.
In historians’ rankings, President Obama is often ranked among the best Presidents in US history, while President Trump is usually among the worst. However, what is an undeniable fact is that the Republican politician received far more votes in his last two presidential elections than his Democratic counterpart in either of his two. President Trump got 74.2 million votes in 2020 and 77.3 million votes in 2024. Meanwhile, President Obama received 69.5 million votes in 2008, which was a record-high number until Joe Biden’s vote total in 2020, which was 81.2 million. Obama, however, won by a much wider popular vote margin in 2008 (7.28 points) than Trump did in 2024 (1.48 points).
President Obama also left office with a significantly higher approval rating, 59 per cent, than what President Trump has ever had, according to another polling firm with a good track record, Gallup. Donald Trump’s highest-ever recorded approval rating by Gallup was 49 per cent. Interestingly, it was from May 2020, in the middle of the initial COVID lockdowns.
This piece of recent polling data, coming from the remarkably reliable source AtlasIntel, is further proof that the American public’s opinion is at times completely out of sync with that of their mainstream media.
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