N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper more popular than Donald Trump, poll finds

N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper is more popular than President Donald Trump among North Carolinians, High Point University’s first poll of the year found.

North Carolinians give Trump a job approval rating of 36 percent and Cooper an approval rating of 46 percent, while a large majority continue to say the country is headed in the wrong direction, according to results of the poll released Tuesday.

Fifty-two percent of N.C. residents disapprove of Trump’s job performance, while 13 percent of poll respondents offered no opinion.

About one in five said they disapprove of Cooper’s performance, with a third refusing to offer an opinion either way.

“Our first job approval ratings for President Trump and Governor Cooper show they have some room to grow,” said Brian McDonald, associate director of the poll and an adjunct instructor. “North Carolinians are just starting to form opinions about their conduct in office, and we will continue to track the public’s reactions to these newly inaugurated executives.”

Three out of five North Carolinians – 61 percent – say the country is on the wrong track, compared to 70 percent who said the same thing to the HPU Poll in February 2016. The university’s most recent poll found that about 27 percent of respondents thought the country was headed in the right direction, compared to 21 percent who said that in February 2016.

Looking back to the beginning of the Obama administration, 49 percent said the country is worse off now than it was eight years ago, compared to 36 percent who consider it better off.

In other findings, 23 percent of North Carolinians approve of how the U.S. Congress is doing its job. The result is about six percentage points higher than when the HPU Poll last asked a sample of all North Carolina adults for a rating of Congress in February 2016.

The N.C. General Assembly had a job approval rating of 27 percent, with 41 percent disapproving and almost a third – 32 percent – refusing to offer a view either way.

The poll was fielded by live interviewers at the High Point University Survey Research Center calling people from Jan. 28 through Feb. 3.

The responses from a sample of all North Carolina counties came from 405 adults with land line or cellular telephones, the university said. The survey had an estimated margin of sampling error of about 4.9 percentage points for all adult respondents and an approximate margin of sampling error of 5.1 percent for self-described registered voters.

The data is weighted toward population estimates for cellular and land line telephone use, age, gender, race, and party identification, officials said. Besides sampling error, factors such as question wording and other methodological choices in conducting survey research can introduce additional error into the findings of opinion polls, university officials said.

Survey details: http://www.highpoint.edu/src/files/2017/02/50memoA.pdf.

This story was originally published February 7, 2017 at 2:02 PM with the headline "N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper more popular than Donald Trump, poll finds."