Only Harry Truman Was Less Popular Before an Election. Take That as a Compliment.

The number everyone is quoting this weekend — via the New York Times’ tally of every president since 1946 — is that Donald Trump enters a midterm season with the second-lowest approval rating of any president heading into one, behind only Harry Truman.

Democrats hear an indictment. Let me be the first, and possibly the only, person in America to say it out loud before Tuesday: it is a compliment of the highest order.

Consider the company. Harry Truman. The man who ran the Berlin Airlift at a time when running anything by air was considered a stunt. The man who fired Douglas MacArthur by mail. The man who lost Congress in the very midterm that made this statistic, retreated into a private life of walks and bad piano, and then, in 1948, defeated Thomas Dewey in the single greatest electoral ambush in American history, on a train, against every poll in the building.

Being ranked behind Harry Truman is not a ranking at all. It is an invitation to the most prestigious club in the republic: presidents whose numbers sagged right before the country did something that made history stop keeping score. There are two members. The club has a waiting list, and the waiting list is every other president since 1946, in order of unremarkableness.

The Democrats who relish the number are making the same mistake the pollsters made in 1948, which is reading the middle of the movie and calling it the ending. The Republicans who fret over it are making the opposite mistake, which is assuming the movie is about the polls at all. History, the only poll that actually reports out, knows that Truman lost this exact midterm — lost it badly, in a wave — and then the voters who sent Congress away sent the man back for a second term two years later with a majority Congress of his own.

So to the president: congratulations. You have been ranked, by the most senior institution in election arithmetic, directly beneath the patron saint of underdog comebacks and above every president who ever enjoyed being liked. That is a worse fate, in the end. Everyone on the list above you is a headline; everyone below you is a library wing.

And to the pollsters, who have spent October measuring a country that already voted, early, by the tens of millions: your sample is now mostly nostalgia. The men and women you surveyed have voted, filed their receipts, and moved on to November. The only thing left to measure is the part nobody measures — the ones who say they will watch the returns with an open mind, which is a category with a sample size of zero and a margin of error you can hear, from here, laughing.

Tuesday, as always, will be judged by history, which conducts its polling out of what is technically called centuries and is colloquially called after everyone else stops talking.

Truman lost the midterms. Truman won the next thing that mattered. The numbers were a rumor in 1946, and they are a rumor now.