President Donald Trump's approval rating has been frozen underground for four straight months, and historical trends suggest there's little reason to expect it to improve before November's midterms, according to CNN's Harry Enten.
The 80-year-old president's net approval rating has held at roughly negative-20 points since late May, moving only slightly from minus-19 to minus-21 points over that span – which Enten flagged as a warning sign for the White House and Republicans.
"This is a president who is stuck on empty," Enten said. "It's just consistently low. It's stuck on empty, stuck on neutral, whatever type of gasoline analogy you want to use."
While there are still two months until the midterms, Enten said modern political history offers little comfort for Trump. Looking at shifts in presidential net approval between late August and Election Day, he said the average swing from 1946 to 2002 was 11 points, when approval could move dramatically in either direction.
But over the last 20 years, in what Enten described as a more polarized political era, the average shift has been just two points, meaning presidents' standing tends to stay roughly where it is at this point in the cycle.
Enten pointed to two historical parallels for a president sitting at or below negative 15 points in net approval this close to a midterm – Harry Truman in 1946 and George W. Bush in 2006.
In both cases, Enten said, the president's party lost control of the House and the Senate, and he singled out the Bush comparison as the closest match to Trump's current situation.
"Right now," Enten concluded, "the plurality leader is actually a Democratic sweep."
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