Poll shows congresswomen attacked by Trump with weak favorability ratings

The four congresswomen whom President Trump attacked over the weekend have weak favorability ratings among a national audience, according to a new poll released Wednesday. 

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) had the highest favorability among the four in The Economist/YouGov Poll. Twenty-two percent of respondents had a very or somewhat favorable opinion of her, compared to 18 percent who had a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion, giving her a net favorability of +4 points.

Only 2 of the 5 Democratic freshmen women included in the survey, Pressley and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), had a positive favorability rating.

Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) all had net negative favorability ratings, of -7 points (24 percent unfavorable to 31 recent favorable), -8 (41 percent unfavorable to 33 percent favorable) and -9 (24 percent unfavorable to 25 percent favorable), respectively. 

{mosads}But a large amount of Americans don’t have opinions on the first-year lawmakers, aside from Ocasio-Cortez.

Sixty percent of respondents did not know if they had a favorable or unfavorable view of Pressley, while 45 percent did not have an opinion either way on Tlaib and 41 percent did not have one on Omar.

Only 26 percent of respondents said they didn’t know what their opinion was on Ocasio-Cortez, whose unexpected primary win over former Rep. Joseph Crowley vaulted her to national notoriety. That is a figure lower than all 2020 Democratic candidates outside of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

All four of the progressive lawmakers had higher net favorability ratings than congressional Democrats overall, who as a party had a -10 rating.

YouGov surveyed 1,500 adults between July 14 — the day Trump attacked the four progressive lawmakers on Twitter— and July 16. The margin of error for the sample is 2.6 percentage points.

Trump on Sunday suggested those lawmakers, all women of color, should “go back” to other countries, despite all four congresswomen being U.S. citizens.

The House on Tuesday passed a Democrat-led resolution condemning Trump’s tweets as “racist,” largely along party lines. Four Republican lawmakers — Reps. Susan Brooks (Ind.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Will Hurd (Texas) and Fred Upton (Mich.) — broke with their party to vote in favor of the resolution.