A Year After Election, Trump Voters, But Few Others, Think He'll Fulfill Campaign Promises

Most voters don't regret the choice they made at the ballot box last November.
President Donald Trump attends a state dinner Tuesday hosted by South Korea's President Moon Jae-in at the Blue House in Seoul.
President Donald Trump attends a state dinner Tuesday hosted by South Korea's President Moon Jae-in at the Blue House in Seoul.
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

A year after President Donald Trump’s election, voters who supported him ― but few others ― believe that he’ll accomplish what he set out to do, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.

A 45 percent plurality of Americans think that Trump is unlikely to live up to most of his campaign promises, with 38 percent saying that he has already or is still likely to do so ― numbers that have budged little since an April survey taken as he neared his 100th day in office. Among those who consider him unlikely to fulfill his pledges, three-quarters say he should face most of the blame for that failure, with just 9 percent putting more of the blame on Congress.

A majority now say they don’t expect him to succeed in “draining the swamp” in Washington or in building a border wall and making Mexico pay for it; a near-majority, 48 percent, doubt he’ll “make America great again.” By a 6-percentage-point margin, however, 45 to 39 percent, they believe he has or will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. ― the promise the nation most wants to see the president fulfill.

(Not all of them will consider that a bad thing. A fifth of Americans, including more than 40 percent of Hillary Clinton voters, say that they don’t want to see Trump keep any of the below promises.)

HuffPost

The vast majority of voters who supported Trump say either that he already has lived up to most of his campaign promises (29 percent) or remains likely to do so (56 percent). Most expect him to accomplish each of the 10 promises asked about in the survey, although their level of bullishness varies: 55 percent think he will “drain the swamp” or has done so already, while nearly three-quarters believe he’ll repeal the Affordable Care Act, and almost 90 percent expect him to bring back jobs.

And to an even greater degree than they did previously, Trump voters see his behavior as president as matching his rhetoric in the campaign trail. Slightly above three-quarters say that Trump’s positions as president are not very or not at all different from what they were when he was running for office, up from 63 percent in the April survey. By contrast, 83 percent of Clinton voters think Trump is unlikely to live up to his campaign promises.

Few voters on either side are rueing the decisions they made last year. Just 1 percent of Clinton voters and 2 percent of Trump voters say they regret their vote in 2016. Some Americans who didn’t make it to the polls last November, however, now wish they’d done so: 18 percent of non-voters say they think they should have voted, although 49 percent say they don’t mind not having participated.

Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Nov. 1-2 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.

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