America’s key swing voters are moving away from President Trump and his policies, according to veteran pollster Larry Sabato.
Appearing on CNN Newsroom, Sabato highlighted that just over six months into Trump’s second term, his approval among independents has cratered, pulling his overall job rating deep underwater.
“But if you’ve noticed the pattern in public opinion polls, and you have to look across all the polls, not just focus on one or two or three that please you, you can see that independents have actually broken pretty substantially against Trump,” the media regular, who runs Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an online newsletter and website that gives electoral projections, told host Jessica Dean.
“They‘re the main reason why his job approval is now in the low to mid-40s. He hasn‘t been over 50 really since the very beginning of his presidency. That is the best signal of what is likely to happen in the midterm elections—job approval for the incumbent president.”
The numbers back him up. A Gallup poll from July shows Trump’s approval among independents at just 29 percent, a 17-point fall since January. Overall, his job rating sits at 37 percent, the lowest of his term so far.
Another poll, by The Independent Center in June, finds just 37 percent of independents approve of Trump’s performance. On his marquee economic legislation—the “Big, Beautiful Bill”—support slips further: just 26 percent back it, while 52 percent say they’re less likely to support it if it increases the deficit.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on August 18, 2025, found that President Trump’s approval rating matched the lowest point of his current term, at 40 percent.
“They tend to be even more focused on the economy than party registrants for Democrats and Republicans,” Sabato said. “So, they‘re looking for economic improvements. They want the prices brought down, as they were promised, and other pieces of the economy to get better. That’s good news, potentially, for Democrats, depending on what happens between now and the midterms.”
Still, he struck a cautious note. “Things aren’t as bad for Democrats as some are portraying. They’re not good either,” Sabato said. “As I said, they‘ve got a lot of work to do, but you can focus too much on the bad.”
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