Let's be honest here. The presidency of Donald J. Trump is off to a rocky start. He's lost approval faster than any president since World War II. His approval ratings look more like those Barack Obama had through most of his presidency than those of John F. Kennedy. If Trump doesn't want to have a disastrous midterm election next year the way Clinton and Obama both did, he's going to have to get his 40-something percent approval rating bumped up by around ten percentage points. He could very well be doing just that.
Trump's new bills
We saw during the State of the Union speech, many have the perception that Donald Trump is against women.
A group of ladies attended the event dressed in white as a symbol of women's rights. This is a sign the president has some work to do in improving his approval rating as things continue.
As a possible means of moving away from the image of him being anti-female, Trump signed several bills into law Tuesday aimed at helping women move forward in science and in business. The Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers and Innovators and Explorers, or INSPIRE Act, is meant to allow NASA to encourage women to get after great careers in engineering, mathematics and science.
The other bill the president signed this week was the Promoting Women In Entrepreneurship Act. This bill allows the National Science Foundation to encourage its existing programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus into the commercial world.
Both of these were signed just ahead of his first State of the Union Address.
Do women's bills have significance?
Often, the State of the Union speech inspires a few pockets of voters here and there to want to get on board with the president and give him a few more approval points. There were times during the presidency of Barack Obama in which his approval rating bumped up a little bit after the State of the Union.
And Donald Trump needs to be getting more Americans on board as soon as possible. A combination of the State of the Union and signing bills aimed at helping women achieve may give him a very slim bump in the polls in the coming weeks. Or it may not.
High approval means better midterm
If we want to take a look at history and how it repeats itself, the lower the approval rating of an American president is during a midterm, the more seats his party loses.
Losing seats in a midterm is a given. It almost certainly will happen, but the president doesn't want to lose any more than what's absolutely necessary. Losing seats means a more hostile Congress, which means the president can't get as much done. It also makes that president's overall legacy look bad.
What's the GOP's near future?
The Democratic party would have to win 24 seats in the House of Representatives next year in order to become the House majority party once again. Presidents with the approval rating of Donald Trump have often lost close to that many seats in the first midterm. Sometimes more. Ask Bill Clinton about that. The Senate might be a different story. Of all the Republican senate seats up for grabs next year, only one is in a swing state.
That's Nevada. All the rest are in pretty die-hard red states. While there are more than 20 Democrat seats up for grabs, most of those are in blue states. Chances are, even if Trump's approval rating is still around 40-percent, the GOP is likely to keep the Senate. They're likely to keep it, there's no guarantees in politics.
Trump's outreach is strategic
Bills signed to help women move forward socio-economically could prove to be a brilliant move on the part of Donald Trump. He needs to do everything he can to up his favorability before November of next year. And of course, there's always time to get an approval rating up. Just ask Bill Clinton about that.
