More polls?, I hear you cry. The election's over! And I get it, I really do, but ... you'll like this one. Trust me.

Puck News partnered up with Echelon Insights to determine how Donald Trump's supposedly outrageous Cabinet selections had impacted his post-election popularity. The mainstream media spent the last two weeks freaking out over Trump's election and then most of last week painting his nominations as evidence of the End Times. 

How did that impact Trump's standing with the electorate? Just the way you'd imagine after voters rejected the Happy Happy Joy Joy cheerleading for Kamala Harris. Trump may have reached new levels of popularity for his political career (via Townhall's Matt Vespa):

Heads are indeed exploding around Washington as Democrats confront the depressing consequences of their 2024 election faceplant and members of the press brace for four more long years of push alerts and a frenzied, near-constant workload. But according to the latest poll from Echelon Insights, which is partnering with Puck for research about the American electorate, voters are generally giving the Trump transition the benefit of the doubt. Echelon polled registered voters from November 14-18, just as news cycles were popping off with Trump’s cabinet announcements, and found that 53 percent of voters approve of the way Trump is handling the transition. Only 40 percent of voters disapproved. 

That’s to be expected after an election, when voters usually welcome an incoming president with some goodwill. But with Trump, there’s a political paradox at work: While Trump himself remains personally unpopular, voters still want him to succeed. A sizable majority of voters (58 percent) say it’s likely “the country will start to head in a better direction in 2025,” while only 38 percent said the opposite. The percentage of Americans who say the country is on the right track is still low (30 percent), but it’s up by a few points compared to Echelon’s final pre-election poll in October.

When was the last time Trump scored a +13 on either job approval or favorability? Answer: never. It's not easy to dig up historical polling data for Trump's first term, but we kept a pretty good eye on that data, and it's tough to recall any specific polls where Trump even ended up in net-positive territory. I did find the RCP aggregation on Trump favorability from 2020, which covers four years. Only a handful were in positive territory, none of them by double digits. 

The same is true for right/wrong direction polling as well, where RCP's aggregation goes all the way back to 2010. Trump got a couple of narrowly net-positive ratings in his first month in office, but otherwise spent four years in the red. Joe Biden got a handful of net-positive ratings in his first four months, but the best of those was a +10 just before his massive stimulus passed in late March. Biden also got a weird +14 outlier in June 2021 from Harvard-Harris, but nothing like the +20 Trump is already getting -- even while considering his supposedly outrageous Cabinet appointments. 

That goes beyond Trump, too:

With Democrats flagellating themselves over their inability to connect with voters who don’t shop at Whole Foods, a majority of Americans (51 percent) now have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party. Adding salt to that wound: Trump’s current favorability rating (49 percent) is higher than those of Harris (47 percent) and President Joe Biden (42 percent). The Republican Party is also now viewed more favorably (48 percent) than the Democratic Party (44 percent).  

Trump has a net-even favorability rating of 49/49. Joe Biden's is 42/55. Harris does better at 47/50, but one has to wonder how long that will last. The media has spent the last couple of weeks shredding her over campaign strategy, lack of connection, and the massive waste of campaign funds that took place over the general election. The media built her up, and now the media will tear her down. 

Echelon did not do much of a deep dive on media outlets. They only polled on five print outlets for trust; the Wall Street Journal fared best at 53/34, but the New York Times was a close second at 51/38. The Washington Post may have gotten a bounce from their refusal to endorse, finishing in positive territory at 46/39. It's gratifying, however, to see Kamala Kid Laurene Powell Jobs' Atlantic crater to 28/38 on trust, and even more so to see the trash outlet The Hill finish dead last at 25/37. 

So what about Trump's Cabinet picks? Only two of them end up with net opposition, and only one with any statistical significance. Care to guess which one? Ah, let's not always see the same hands:

Even Kristi Noem gets a +1, although it's functionally the same as Pete Hegseth's -2 -- a virtual tie. Rubio gets the widest positive gap, which shouldn't be a surprise. The biggest gap of all is negative, however -- Matt Gaetz' -11, and Gaetz also has the second-highest "strongly oppose" rating (after Elon Musk, oddly). Gaetz only gets 50% among Republican respondents in this survey (and 14% opposition); Gabbard gets 56%, and Rubio gets 71%, for comparison purposes. Shedding Gaetz won't do much damage to Trump within his party, in other words.

Overall, this shows Trump getting an enormous honeymoon from the electorate, and arguably a mandate -- although I'll explore that question in an upcoming post.