The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 29 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
What if we told you that Donald Trump is a really unpopular president? Would that surprise you? It’s certainly not something you hear much in the media. Yet in the last few days, five big national polls have come out showing Trump’s approval numbers in really terrible shape. This is even more visible on specific issues—on many of them, he’s polling in the 30s. He’s underwater on his supposedly strongest issue of immigration, too.
And on top of that, a number of his most dramatic moments recently seem to have flopped for him—from the effort to fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel to the indictment of former FBI Director Jim Comey. Lakshya Jain, the co-founder of the data firm Split Ticket and head of political data at The Argument, has been making the case that Trump isn’t actually in such a strong position right now politically. So we’re going to talk about how the heck we can get this basic political fact—that Trump is very unpopular—more broadly understood. Lakshya, good to have you on.
Lakshya Jain: Hey, thanks for having me.
Sargent: So I’m just going to start with some numbers. The new Quinnipiac poll has Trump’s approval at an abysmal 38 percent, while 54 percent disapprove. The new Associated Press poll has him at 39 percent approving to 60 percent disapproving. The new Gallup poll has him at 40 percent to 56 percent. Reuters has him at 41 percent, and the new Economist/YouGov poll has him at 39 to 56. Lakshya, those numbers are bad. What’s your reading of these findings?
Jain: Oh, they’re horrible. And you know, this is as bad as I can remember it being for a first year president, so to say. This is the second term, but it’s still the period in time at which the president’s approval ratings are generally at their highest.
You know, Joe Biden ended his tenure extremely poorly in the court of public opinion, but it’s really important to remember that Biden was not this unpopular at this point in time in his first year. Trump is at levels that have only really been approached by Trump 1.0. That’s it.
That’s the only historical comparable. But Greg, what’s interesting to me, if I may, is that the disapproval this time is of a completely different nature, and I would argue a far more damaging nature than the first time around, because the first time around, it was centered around his abuse of the office, or so to say, people thinking he was unfit to lead the country. But people liked the economy. People really liked the economy under Trump. His economic numbers were consistently positive or break even the first time around. This time, what’s happening is people really hate Trump not for the abuse of office. They hate him for the economy.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about some economic numbers, because if you drill down into these polls, they look even more gruesome for Trump. The Quinnipiac poll has Trump on the economy at 39 percent approving to 56 percent disapproving. On trade, he’s at 39 to 54. The AP poll has Trump on the economy at 37 to 62. On trade, 36 to 63.
So those numbers really bear out your point. And I think maybe what a lot of people haven’t really gotten their heads around as well is how bad the tariffs are for Trump. Can you talk about sort of how that stew has developed? He’s kind of getting much more of what he wanted on the economy this time than he did last time, ironically enough, and that’s worse for him.
Jain: He’s getting much more of what he wanted, and people are getting much more of what he wanted. That’s important to note. And they all hate it, because the thing is the American people elected Donald Trump because they felt that Joe Biden was at fault for inflation.
And they thought that, given Trump’s economy and given how they felt Biden was unfit to lead, Trump would do a better job stewarding the economy. But this time around, they think he’s been obsessed with things like the woke culture wars and about persecuting his political opponents, and not focused enough on issues that they care about.
You know, when people say like,
the American people don’t care about all these things that elites think they do. I mean, that goes both ways, right? Like, yes, the democratic championing of norms has not worked out for them. And that is true. That is unquestionably true. But it is also true that Trump trying to focus all of his efforts on, you know, prosecuting his political opponents and going after them is also seen poorly because people don’t care about that. They’re like, why are you focused on that? My bills are so high.
Sargent: Yeah, and let’s also talk about how Trump is fearing on immigration. This is supposed to be his best issue. Quinnipiac has him at 41 percent to 55 percent. Poll after poll after poll has shown that he’s underwater on this issue. Maybe with the exception of border security, but on interior enforcement, on immigration in the country, how he’s treating immigrants—he’s really, really floundering.
And I think it’s worth underscoring that this is another area where Trump is mostly getting his way to a degree that he didn’t during the first term. He just got this big, ugly bill passed that gave him tens of billions of dollars to carry out ICE enforcement. The whole apparatus has ramped up to a degree that’s far beyond anything we could have even imagined during the first term. And there again, backlash, public hating it. What do you make of it?
Jain: Yeah. So, you know, usually when people see a president being super active and doing big things, they actually don’t like it. And this is one of the most counterintuitive and yet robust findings in American politics. The more people see a president doing things, the more upset they get—because really speaking, unless you’re in a Great Depression–level crisis where action is demanded, people don’t want to rock the boat. And they see Trump’s actions as rocking the boat.
And now with Biden, the question was about whether he was fit to lead and the economy was really bad. But this time around with Trump, the issue is that he’s out there pushing for things that were never really truly that popular. He’s doing it in a very public way. He’s dominating the news headlines again, and people don’t like that. Every time he comes back into the public eye, his numbers plummet. People see him focused on things that they don’t care about, and they seem very loudly focused on that.
Now these are not popular policies, they’re not the policies people want him to focus on. To me it comes as no surprise that he is really, really floundering.
Sargent: Well, I want to talk about that, because some of these big displays that sort of go to his weird pathological obsessions and his abuses of power are also failing for him. And yet at the same time, they’re the things that are giving him the most public attention right now. These are his biggest moves and gestures of late—some of his most dramatic displays—failing badly.
We just had him try to get Jimmy Kimmel removed from the air. That imploded with his quick restoration. And this indictment of former FBI Director James Comey—it’s getting brutally panned across the spectrum for being such a weak case. I wonder if there’s almost a double whammy hitting him here.
Everybody is really worried about the economy. Trump seems to be unleashing all this economic chaos with the tariffs. He’s blundering around, breaking things economically. And so that is working against him. But then the public also sees him doing these crazy things like trying to get comedians taken off the air and indicting former FBI directors in almost buffoonishly corrupt ways.
Is there a double whammy effect here with him, do you think?
Jain: You know, up until this week, I would have said no. I would have said that his disapproval was really just stemming from chaotic handling of immigration and a bad handling of the economy. But I did notice a noticeable drop in his approvals following the whole Charlie Kirk thing. And I actually blame that to start everything.
So, like, here’s the thing. Charlie Kirk’s assassination—absolutely horrific. People are agreeing on that, right? They’re like, this is terrible, political violence is bad. What they don’t agree with is a president using that to leverage the powers of the office against his critics. And that was a very high-profile action Trump did.
And I noticed right after that—basically the day that ABC announced Jimmy Kimmel would be off air and Trump’s FCC began going after things—there was a lot of negative press associated with Trump’s free speech actions. He doubled down on it. That’s when his approval rating fell even further.
So, Silver Bulletin Nate Silver’s polling average actually had Donald Trump’s average approval rating going down by 3 percent since the whole Jimmy Kimmel saga began—which is crazy to me, because I usually think those things never move the needle. With such a high-profile action taken by Trump, that was the one thing where people were like, hold on, what are you doing here?
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s a really profound point, because what it gets at—to my mind anyway—is that for the American people, there’s a very deep-seated sense of what presidents are supposed to do in these really searing, traumatic situations. And Trump didn’t do anything like what the American people expect.
They really expect soothing words, they expect unifying words. And for Trump to go out there—and we should bring this up, right?—he went out there and he said, my side, the right, their political violence is just fine. You know, it’s the other side’s political violence that’s bad. And then going after the comedian and stuff.
I think maybe what you’re seeing there is a backlash to Trump really not behaving like a president in line with the expectations of the American people. What do you think? Is that part of it?
Jain: I do think that’s part of it, but I don’t really think it’s about him saying like the left’s free speech is bad and the right’s
or the left’s political violence is bad and the right’s political violence is good. I think it’s about him heavy-handedly saying that the left should not be allowed to speak. And using the presidency in such a high profile manner, I think that’s really the problem here with Trump.
Sargent: I want to talk about this as well because we had this huge debate after Trump won again about why it is that Democrats can’t seem to get penetration in the culture.
And that’s a real debate that Democrats have to have. Trump, one of his secret sauces is the penetration he gets in the culture, which is a remarkable thing. I think it explains a lot on why he’s been able to shift non-white working class people a little bit his way.
He’s understood in the culture as this kind of, you know, can do figure who is, who gets stuff done, who builds things, who fires people, who cracks heads. And so that’s the understanding of him in the culture. With this Jimmy Kimmel thing, that got a level of penetration into the culture as well that you rarely get with politics. This is something I think you’ve been preoccupied with a little bit at times. Can you talk about it?
Jain: Yeah, Democrats in general can’t command the news cycle super well compared to Trump, because Trump is a guy that knows TV and knows media inside out. He knows how to get reporters hopping on their feet and in and around him in a flash. He is a master at this.
But the thing is, with the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing, that’s actually a major step up. That is a president saying that a comedian who’s been around for 20 years—like, Jimmy Kimmel is a household name in America, a comedian that’s been around for 20 years—I agree that he should not be allowed to speak, and they need to do more of that.
So that’s all of a sudden like bringing in the—almost like, I call it—the woke right. That’s not very popular either. The woke left was not popular. Well, the woke right is just as unpopular. Because, again, people don’t like being told what to say, what to think, and what to watch. And when you start doing that, that’s when problems start happening.
Sargent: Yeah. And this is another example, I think, of him really behaving in a manner that Americans sort of as a general matter don’t expect from a president too.
Jain: This has been a consistent pattern with Trump is that the more he’s out of sight, the more he’s out of mind. And then you remember the idea of what you associated most with the time when he was president. And so Greg, this brings me to a point that I wanted to
to touch on, which is that I think there’s a much bigger political danger for Donald Trump this time around than there was in 2017 to 2018. Because in 2017, 2018, the stock market was phenomenal and the economy by all accounts was really good. This time around, you can’t say the same thing.
Sargent: Yeah, I’ll say. Well, you had this great piece recently where you took on the idea that the Democratic Party is
really unpopular, which is true. The Democratic Party is polling as badly as it has in a very long time. And that is obviously a cause for concern among Democrats and should be. But you argued that people shouldn’t kind of overreact to it.
Jain: Democrats are unpopular because Democratic voters dislike the Democratic Party for not doing enough to stand up to Trump. But people have taken that to mean that the Republican party enjoys an edge with independents and with swing voters. And that is just not true. Look, whether a Democrat voter disagrees with the Democratic party does not change the reality that, you know, among independents where the battle is generally won and lost, Democrats actually lead the Republicans. And that’s a very big thing no one talks about.
Sargent: Can you give us some numbers on that?
Jain: Yes. So, you know, in our poll at The Argument, the Democratic Party actually edged the Republicans by a couple of points with independents. Now, they were both pretty bad, but with independents and with non-voters, if you ask them which party they prefer, they actually opted for the Democrats. That’s the case in our new survey that’s coming out too—you know, just like a small preview.
In our survey, the Democrats are actually edging the Republicans in favorability among people that didn’t vote for any candidate in 2024. So the people that didn’t vote in 2024 are going to constitute about 12 percent of the electorate in 2026. It’s not that high of a number, but it’s also not nothing either. That’s quite a bit. Among that group, the Republicans have a favorability number of 27 percent and unfavorable 54 percent. The Democrats are at 38 and unfavorable 45. You know, these groups don’t like either party, but they’re much warmer towards the Democrats than they are towards the Republicans at this point.
But we’ve decided to skip that over in favor of the fact that Democrats are much less likely to approve of the Democratic Party than Republicans are to approve of the Republican Party. If you look at the generic ballot matchup in the polls, Democrats lead by four nationally right now. In our survey that’s coming out, they lead by about five. So, you know, over and over again, you see a consistent Democratic edge in the surveys.
And, you know, is that going to be large enough to flip the House? At this level, it should be. We’ll see. But the truth is that I think we focus on all the wrong things when we’re doing political analysis.
Sargent: With Donald Trump, everybody’s brains have just gotten completely fried. And we just can’t keep our eyes on the fundamentals when Trump is around because there’s just this sort of myth out there in the media and kind of, and frankly, in the heads of Democrats, very deeply in the heads of Democrats, that Trump is special, that he breaks the rules of politics and gets away with it.
Now I understand why people feel like that. His comeback was a shocking event, a traumatic event for Democrats. Yet at the same time, if you look at all these numerical facts that we’re talking about here,
you can kind of see that the basic structural elements of politics are behaving a little bit the way we expect them to. Can you talk about that? Does that seem right to you?
Jain: It does. I think the thing that stuck out to me the most this time is that Trump has behaved like a normal president would in public opinion. What happens with every other president? They start popular and they become more unpopular. That’s exactly what happened with Trump. He started out really, really high this time.
And he took a steady decline, then plummeted because of the tariffs, rebounded back a little bit and now plummeted again because of his free speech handling.
Sargent: So the old rules of politics really could apply to Trump after all. Is that what you’re telling us, Lakshya?
Jain: And the Republican party.
Sargent: So what does that look like? If the old rules do apply, what do we see happen from now until January of 2027?
Jain: I mean, I would just expect a Democratic House, and I would expect that as the midterms near, you’re going to start seeing more and more Republicans put some distance between themselves and the president, or attempt to do that. And then Trump may not like it, but I think you’re going to start seeing a wave of Republican retirements. You’re already seeing that, actually, to be honest.
And I think you’re going to see that, like, the political environment, the media coverage, starts to shift towards the Democrats probably come, like, early 2026, mid-2026.
Sargent: And I will add that you’re seeing some pretty strong recruits by the Democrats in some of these house races. There’s a 2018 flavor of it in my mind. In 2018, a whole bunch of people who wouldn’t have ordinarily run for office started getting involved because they saw Trump as a threat. I think you’re seeing another version of that happen now. And that also is, I think, a sign that the rules of politics are actually functioning because the opposition party is energized and angry, which it always is when it loses the White House two years earlier. Is that how you see this playing out as well?
Jain: That is basically exactly how I see it playing out. And then, you know, who knows what happens in 2028, but I think Democrats mostly just need to keep faith at this point—which is really hard to do, obviously. I mean, for Democrats, it’s near impossible to not worry.
Trust me, Greg, we could be up by like six points in November of 2026, and we’re going to have think pieces about how the Democratic Party is failing to take advantage of the political moment. It’s going to happen. And we’re going to have Democrats leaking to Politico that they think they’re going to lose the Pennsylvania governor’s race against Doug Mastiano.
They’re just amazing at worrying about things that I’m not sure why you would worry about. And then they’re amazing about not worrying about things that you should worry about. But here, here I think they’re in better position than people think.
Sargent: Lakshya Jain, that is a really, really interesting reading of the current situation and the politics to come. We really appreciate you coming on, man. Thanks so much.
Jain: Hey, thanks for having me.
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