But do Trump’s tweets merely annoy voters or can they actually make it hard for him to stay on track and maintain his support with the American public? In last week’s edition of our politics podcast, I wondered if there were any relationship between the frequency with which Trump sends out incendiary tweets — such as his recent rants against the NFL and some of its players — and his approval ratings.

The answer is that there probably is such a relationship — periods when Trump sends out exclamatory or inflammatory tweets have been correlated with future approval-rating declines. But the relationship is somewhat noisy, and the causality isn’t totally clear. So we’d encourage you to read this story as a plausible hypothesis that will need further proof.