Donald Trump was elected president despite a historically high disapproval rating. And since being sworn in as president, those numbers have only gotten worse. In a country that is divided, ideologically, more or less down the middle, a recent Quinnipiac poll finds that about 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of the president on nearly every metric: his efforts (or lack thereof) to unify the country; his overall performance; his response to the violence in Charlottesville; the way he is handling race relations. Even white men, Trump’s core demographic, seem to have soured on the president: while 77 percent of Republicans still approve of his performance, only 52 percent of white voters with no college degrees, and 50 percent of white men, said the same.

But numbers can be misleading, especially when filtered through the labyrinthine system of electoral politics (just ask Hillary Clinton how winning the popularity vote worked out for her). A new survey, released Wednesday night from Trump’s campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, underscores that point:

Yes, Trump is only polling at 50 percent among Republican voters in a hypothetical 2020 primary. But critics shouldn’t celebrate just yet: Trump faced worse odds in the 2016 G.O.P. primary and did, indeed, crush his opponents. “In a 5-way race against 4 well known challengers, 2 of which ran against him before[,] I’d say that is pretty strong,” Fabrizio tweeted. That’s how the U.S. electoral system works at the presidential level.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course: as Jill Stein told me in an interview last year, in the wake of the election, the U.S. could move to a “ranked-choice voting” system, which has already been adopted by several states at the local level. “It lets you go into a voting booth and instead of just voting for one person, you can rank your choices. So if your first choice loses—say you vote for an underdog that you really like who has your view of health care or student debt or of higher public education, you could actually vote for what you want with the assurance that if your first choice loses, your vote is automatically assigned to your second choice,” she explained. “So it’s a win-win situation, and it lets people stop worrying about splitting the vote or somebody spoiling the election.”

Until then, intra-party dynamics will continue to favor the incumbent, and reward candidates in the safer position. Still, the fact that pollsters like Fabrizio are asking about potential primary challengers, just eight months into Trump’s presidency, is revealing in and of itself. Republicans in Congress have already begun to break with the president on critical policy and procedural issues, derailing his agenda. That may hurt them more than Trump, if Fabrizio’s polling is correct. Trump himself has already returned to the campaign trail, in the form of “campaign-style rallies,” in order to drive a wedge between his base and the G.O.P. Running against the party would be a complex balancing act in 2020, but Trump has played the outsider card before. He’s always been stronger as a rebel than a leader.