CBS News Poll: Viewers Call Trump's Speech To Congress 'Presidential' And 'Unifying'
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Viewers across the country strongly approved of President Donald Trump's first address to Congress Tuesday night, with many Democrats joining Republicans in calling it "presidential," according to a new CBS News poll.
The poll found that 82 percent of total speech watchers said Trump's address was "presidential" while 71 percent called it "unifying."
When broken down, the poll found 97 percent of Republicans, 54 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Independents say Trump came across as "presidential" in his speech.
Half of Democrats did find the speech "divisive" but about one-third of them also said Trump was "specific" and "knowledgeable," according to the poll.
Eighty-seven percent of Republicans, 19 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Independents found the president's tone to be "very positive" while 18 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans "strongly approved" of the president's message.
The president also saw double digit gains in approval of his views on terrorism, Obamacare, crime, the economy and immigration, the poll found.
Wednesday morning, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appeared less than impressed with what he called dissonance between the president's words and actions.
"This is another one of his speeches," he said. "He talks like a populist but he is governing from the far right."
But Vice President Mike Pence said the country saw the president's true colors.
"President Trump is someone who leads by collaboration," Pence said. "He brings people together and last night he really challenged the Congress to come together to solve these intractable problems that frankly, we've ignored for decades."
Meanwhile, Twitter says some 3 million tweets were sent about Trump's speech Tuesday night. The numbers make it the most tweeted speech by a president to Congress in the relatively short history of the platform.
The previous mark was 2.6 million tweets.
The top tweeted moment was the Republican's call to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. That was followed by Trump's salute to Carryn Owens, the widow of Senior Chief William "Ryan'' Owens, who was killed last month in Yemen.
Google says the top trending question users asked during the night was "who wrote Donald Trump's speech?'' People also wanted to know how tall the president is and whether he's a Democrat or a Republican.
The CBS News poll was conducted immediately after the conclusion of the President's Address to Congress by re-contacting a scientifically sampled panel of Americans who had first been interviewed in the days leading up to the speech, and had stated that they planned to watch. A total of 857 speech watchers were interviewed. The margin of error for the total sample is 4.2 points.
(© Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
