WASHINGTON — Mired in a persistent cost of living crisis and an unpopular war with Iran, President Trump reached a perilous milestone last week, registering an approval rating of 34% in a top-tier poll — a record low less than halfway through his second term.
The results mark one of the sharpest polling collapses of any modern president. The data, from the Economist and YouGov, brings Trump back down to his political nadir, matching a number he hasn’t seen since the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack five years ago.
It follows on several other surveys published in recent days showing the president entering precarious political territory roughly six months ahead of the midterm elections, raising alarm bells in Republican campaign offices across the country over the party’s prospects in the fall.
It has also led pollsters to question long-standing assumptions about the president’s floor of support, wondering whether it is at risk of giving way.
“It’s harder to get lower, but it’s possible depending on what he does,” said Christopher Wlezien, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “To get that number down, you are going to have to eat into his core.”
Trump’s base of support remains strong, reinforcing a long-standing theory among pollsters that partisanship now serves as a direct proxy for presidential approval. But softening Republican support on specific policy matters — including top voter priorities, such as the economy — have begun raising questions among experts whether further erosion is possible.
A New York Times poll found his approval at 38%, and a Politico poll recorded a similar erosion, driven by a majority of Americans — including 18% of Trump supporters — stating they are financially worse off than they were before he resumed office.
Roughly 2 out of 3 Americans oppose the war Trump started with Iran. And the coalition that swept him back into office — including a surge in support from Latino, independent and young voters — has effectively disappeared.
While the downward trend looks like a story of a presidency in perpetual trouble, political scientists see a more complicated picture.
“Polarization has raised the floor and lowered the ceiling for approval ratings,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “Dramatic swings are less common because approval ratings are now fixed to partisanship.”
The comparison to George W. Bush, whose numbers famously soared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and cratered into the mid-20s after Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war, is instructive of how polarization has changed in the Trump era.
Bush governed in a country capable of moving together, in favor or against a president, in response to major events. Americans are no longer swayed in that way when it comes to their views of the president, Rottinghaus argues.
“Approval ratings today are increasingly a measure of who the president is rather than what the president does,” he said.
Trump, in his own way, has seemed to nod at this dynamic. When challenged on his standing with the public, or when a Republican lawmaker breaks with him over a policy issue, he has made the argument that he and the MAGA movement are inseparable. In other words, that opposition to any decision he makes is opposition to the movement itself.
“MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do,” Trump said in a January interview with NBC News when asked if his base supports long-term military interventions abroad.
Rottinghaus compared the questions about presidential approval as the “same as asking whether you’re Republican or not.”
“So why ask it,” he said.
Gallup, the organization that had tracked presidential approval for eight decades, announced earlier this year that it would stop publishing approval ratings of individual political figures, a shift that underscores how the traditional measure of a politician’s popularity has evolved.
When asked about the change, a Gallup spokesperson told the Washington Post at the time that “the context around these measures has changed.”
“They are now widely produced, aggregated and interpreted, and no longer represent an area where Gallup can make its most distinctive contribution,” the spokesperson added.
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