i want to ask you about it poll numbers. he s coming in at the lowest approval numbers. 40% for bush and 61%. so 40% for trump and 61 for bush. are you surprised by that? what s surprising is that bush in 2001 after bush/gore and a contested election that was decided by the supreme court still had had 61%. and donald trump has said he doesn t trust these numbers and if i were him i think i d say the same thing but when you look at the other numbers in our poll, people may not think that that transition is going well but they have high expectations for him. 71% believe he s going to create better jobs for people who need them. 61% say he s going to negotiate
exit poll numbers, you re not going to figure out where will truman be 25, 50 years from now. likewise with obama. i think obama will go down as one of the great presidents we have ever had. mark halpern, also, though, one of the things that historians will have to sort through is the fact that you look past the poll numbers today, but you look at the economic numbers. you look not only where the stock market was at its low point, you look at where unemployment was, double digits. you look at where it is now. you look at where wages, even wages, stubbornly have started to rise. you look at by just about every economic metric, things have improved economically. he will get, obviously, hit very hard by historians on syria and other foreign policy matters. but domestically, i think one of the things that is going to be hard for historians to sort through is how a president who
summer of 2015. the government is broken. it s not working for you when it comes to trade deals. it s not working for you when it comes to immigration or terrorism. as he has been saying the last few weeks, it s time to drain the swamp of washington, d.c. that has been a very powerful message. and obviously it s taken root in the minds of a lot of voters. only 15 minutes away, dana, or so from the first actual votes coming in. exit poll numbers are important. they give us a clue, an indication. sometimes they re right. sometimes not so right. votes obviously count. that s the whole ball game. no question about it. it is going to be so fascinating to see, as the boards come in, as you start to read them, whether or not what we ve been looking at, whether it is the divide in terms of the way voters want this country to go or the divide with regard to these two candidates bear out in how we see these states come out. let s go over to anderson for some analysis. kirsten, as we look
wins, the type of people he d put in office are divisive people. rudy giuliani. anderson, the first exit poll numbers will give us an indication of who is actually voting, why they are voting the way they are. i want to go to cnn s david chalian. our political director. you ve been crunching the numbers. the first poll closings in a few hours. interviews we conducted across the nation with voters as they were leaving the polls. these are preliminary numbers. they ll shift throughout the night. one of the things we re looking at is when did people decide. take a look at this. when few late deciders. 7% tell us in the last few days. 5% say within the last week. that s 12% there. but the other 88% decided in october or before that. so swirl of headlines at the end of the campaign, just a small group of late deciders there. another thing that we looked at, wolf, is a quality the qualities in the candidate that people are looking for here.
what do the numbers say to you, jake? they suggest if they hold up, these are earlyish exit poll numbers. this could be a long night and a competitive race. if a lot of people feel resentful of washington, that s isn t. 54% supporting president obama, approving of the job he s done is also significant. it shows what we ve said all along. this could be a very competitive race. the fact that barack obama s approval rating is well above 50% is very telling. it is so different from what we have seen in recent history with a president on their way out, republican or democrat. it is a reminder of why hillary clinton has done something unusual, which is embrace a two-term president, and effectively run on a third term. there are a lot of angry voters based on these numbers out there that, as you say, that seems to bode relatively well for donald trump. it would. that s the message he has been driving home since the moment he came down the escalator in the