A whopping seven in 10 voters said President Donald Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress boosted their optimism, according to a CNN/ORC poll.
Roughly 70 percent of surveyed viewers said that Trump’s policies expressed in his speech would guide the country in the right direction. Seventy-two percent said the president’s economic policies were right on track, while 70 percent approved of his counterterrorism proposals. Sixty-four percent of those polled liked Trump’s comments on tax policy, whereas 62 percent and 61 percent approved of his immigration and health care stances, respectively.
“And for people who have been hoping that he would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment.”
Two-thirds of respondents believed Trump’s speech was on the right ideological track, 26 percent dubbed it too conservative, and 8 percent didn’t think it was as conservative as it could have been, the poll found.
The CNN/ORC poll surveyed 509 Americans who viewed Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress Tuesday. Of those polled, 33 percent identified as Republicans, 28 percent said they were Democrats, and 39 percent were independents.
But that wasn’t the only poll that showed a positive reaction to Trump’s message and tone. A CBS News/YouGov poll found that a whopping 82 percent of viewers found the speech to be “presidential” and 76 percent said they approved of the content. In addition, 36 percent of the Democrats polled admitted they found the speech “unifying.”
The CBS News/YouGov poll, which surveyed 857 speech-watchers, consisted of 39 percent Republicans, 23 percent Democrats, and 38 percent independents.
High percentages of those surveyed in the CBS News/YouGov poll approved of Trump’s policies, while 61 percent said they felt “more optimistic” afterward. Seventy percent liked the president’s stated immigration policies, 75 percent liked his economic policies, 78 percent approved of his infrastructure plans, and 65 percent liked where he was going with Obamacare.
After a particularly bitter and divisive 2016 election season, Trump’s first major speech since his Jan. 20 inaugural address was met with overwhelmingly positive responses from both the Left and the Right.
In one stunning reversal of tone, frequent Trump critic and CNN contributor Van Jones praised the president’s address and emphasized one key moment in particular — the moment when the crowd gave a prolonged standing ovation to Carryn Owens, the widow of the Navy SEAL recently killed in a raid in Yemen.
“He became president of the United States in that moment. Period,” Jones said on CNN immediately following Trump’s speech. “There are a lot of people who have a lot of reasons to be frustrated with him, to be mad at him. But that was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics. Period.”
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“And for people who have been hoping that he would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment,” Jones added. “For people who have been hoping that maybe he would remain a divisive cartoon — which he often finds a way to do — they should begin to become a little bit worried tonight.”
Jones added that Democrats should be worried following Trump’s impressive speech because “if he finds a way to do that over and over again, he’s going to be there for eight years.”
“Now there is a lot that he said in that speech that was counterfactual, that was not right, that I oppose and will oppose,” Jones emphasized. “But he did something tonight that you cannot take away from him. He became president of the United States.”
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