A majority of voters say the Carrier deal gives them a more favorable view of Donald Trump. | Getty Poll: Trump's Carrier deal is wildly popular

Donald Trump’s first major action as president-elect — the deal he and Vice President-elect Mike Pence struck last week with Carrier Corp. — is earning high marks from American voters, a new Politico/Morning Consult poll shows.

Voters surveyed overwhelmingly view Trump’s negotiations with Carrier — which resulted in about 1,000 manufacturing jobs at the heating, ventilation and air conditioning company remaining in Indiana rather than moving to Mexico — as an appropriate use of presidential prerogative. And a majority of voters say the Carrier deal gives them a more favorable view of Trump, though his overall favorability ratings were virtually unchanged from mid-November.


While some conservatives and conservative groups — including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin — have decried the Carrier deal as “crony capitalism,” the Politico/Morning Consult poll shows it’s a political winner for Trump. Sixty percent of voters say Carrier’s decision to keep some manufacturing jobs in Indiana, where Pence is still serving as governor, gives them a more favorable view of Trump. That includes not only 87 percent of self-identified Republicans, but also 54 percent of independents and 40 percent of Democrats.

Only 9 percent say it makes them view Trump less favorably, while 22 percent say it doesn’t have an impact either way.

“The Carrier announcement was big for Trump,” said Kyle Dropp, Morning Consult co-founder and chief research officer. “Rarely do we see numbers that high when looking at how specific messages and events shape public opinion.”

The poll was conducted last Thursday and Friday — immediately after Carrier’s public announcement of the deal, an event at which the company’s executives were joined by Trump and Pence. Morning Consult conducted the survey using its online methodology; the poll included interviews with 1,401 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Although the Carrier deal is popular, voters aren’t following Trump’s initial moves as president-elect with the same intensity with which they tracked the campaign. In the survey, a full quarter of voters said they had heard “nothing at all” about Carrier’s decision to keep some jobs in Indiana, while only 24 percent had heard “a lot about it.”

But voters are also likely to support executive-branch negotiations with private companies — and other tactics designed to prevent corporations from moving jobs to other countries — after Trump’s inauguration next month, despite some unease from congressional GOP leadership.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California on Monday refused to back Trump’s threats to impose a 35 percent tariff on imports from companies that move American jobs overseas, but voters overwhelmingly support raising taxes on companies that move manufacturing jobs to other countries, the poll shows. Seventy-four percent of voters support raising taxes on such companies, with 46 percent who strongly supporting tax hikes on companies that send manufacturing jobs to other countries — including 53 percent of Republican voters, a larger share than the 43 percent of Democrats who strongly favor those kinds of tax hikes.

Similarly, Republican voters say they are more likely to support one-off interventions with private companies like the Carrier deal than are Democratic voters. Asked whether it is acceptable for the president and vice president to negotiate directly with private businesses, a 51 percent majority of voters say that is appropriate, including 69 percent of Republicans. Just 27 percent say it is unacceptable, including 41 percent of Democrats.

A larger, 62 percent majority — 78 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents — say it is acceptable for the president and vice president to offer tax breaks or incentives to individual companies to keep jobs in the U.S., while only 2 in 10 voters say it’s inappropriate.

And 56 percent of voters say it’s acceptable for the president and vice president to “negotiate with individual private companies on a case-by-case basis,” including three-quarters of Republicans.

Overall, a 58 percent majority of voters describe keeping manufacturing jobs in the country as a “top priority” for Trump and the 115th Congress — eclipsed on the list of issues offered to respondents only by combating the Islamic State group (63 percent).

That’s ahead of some other top GOP priorities, including reducing federal spending (56 percent rated it as a “top priority”), an infrastructure bill (43 percent), repealing the 2010 health care law (37 percent), passing comprehensive tax reform (37 percent), increasing military spending (36 percent), renegotiating trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (32 percent) and building a wall along the Mexican border (20 percent).

While voters mostly view the Carrier deal as a positive move for Trump, they remain sharply divided on the president-elect. Forty-eight percent of voters have a favorable opinion of Trump, roughly equal to the 47 percent who view Trump unfavorably. That’s unchanged from two weeks ago, when 46 percent of voters viewed Trump favorably, the same percentage that had an unfavorable opinion of him.

Voters’ negative impressions of Trump are more intense: Thirty-eight percent have a “very unfavorable” opinion of him, including 70 percent of Democrats. That’s larger than the 27 percent who view Trump very favorably, which includes 55 percent of Republicans.

But even though Trump’s favorability ratings remain at parity, voters are questioning the appropriateness of Trump’s chief communications tool: Twitter. A majority of voters, 56 percent, say Trump uses Twitter “too much,” while 5 percent say Trump doesn’t tweet enough and 16 percent say Trump uses the social-media site “about the right amount.”

Only 23 percent of voters describe Trump’s Twitter use as a “good thing,” with 49 percent calling it a “bad thing.” The remaining 28 percent said they didn’t have an opinion.

Voters aren’t ready to wrestle Trump’s Twitter account away from him, however. They are split on whether the president should have a personal Twitter account: Forty-two percent say the president should have a Twitter account, while 39 percent say the president shouldn’t.

Morning Consult is a nonpartisan media and technology company that provides data-driven research and insights on politics, policy and business strategy.

More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents — Toplines: http://bit.ly/2g5AsCz | Crosstabs: http://bit.ly/2h2EgUW