A new poll from The New York Times and Siena University has ominous news for Republicans: President Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president before a midterm election since the dawn of modern polling.
Sitting at 34 percent, it’s lower than George W. Bush’s was in 2006, before Democrats flipped 31 seats in the House and five in the Senate, winning both chambers. It’s lower than his own was in 2018, when Democrats flipped 41 seats in the House. It’s considerably lower than Barack Obama’s was in 2010, before the midterm “shellacking” that netted Republicans more than 60 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.
It is not, however, lower than views of the Democratic Party.
Democrats have a lot to be happy about in this poll, including the fact that they appear to have improved their standing among groups who powered Trump’s 2024 victory: men, young voters and Hispanic voters.
But there are several bright spots for Republicans across a map that already favors them. Let’s take a look at them.
The Democratic Party is deeply unpopular.
My colleague Ruth Igielnik, a polling editor for The Times, put it this way: The only people less popular than Trump are the Democrats.
Today’s poll found that just 28 percent of voters said they were satisfied with the Democratic Party, compared with 36 percent who said the same of the Republican Party. Many of those dissatisfied with the party are, in fact, Democrats themselves — 43 percent of Democrats said they were dissatisfied with their own party.
That explains why so many Democrats running in red and purple states, like Kansas, are keeping their distance from the national party. And it hints at tensions within the party that are likely to persist well beyond Election Day.
The Senate is not the House.
The poll found that likely voters preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional districts. That’s a big number, my colleague Nate Cohn writes:
In this particular poll, the Democratic lead is large enough that the party would still deliver a significant victory even if it were off by as much as the polls were in 2016 or 2020.
But when our pollsters asked voters in the 35 states that have a Senate race whether they would vote for the Democrat or the Republican, the Democrats’ lead narrowed to just five points. That could be a sign that reclaiming the Senate is still a tall order for Democrats, who are trying to flip seats in several red states while battling it out in purple states, too.
Democrats still have an advantage on immigration — but it’s shrinking.
It was a surprise when, last month, a Times/Siena poll showed the Democrats had a seven-point advantage over Republicans on the question of which party voters trusted more to handle immigration. After all, immigration was one of the key issues that lifted Trump back to the White House.
The latest poll showed that immigration is re-emerging as a defining concern for voters, and that the Democrats’ advantage has shrunk to four points. Nearly 20 percent of Republicans now say the issue is their top priority — nearly twice as many as those who said so last month.
But can the polls be trusted?
One of the questions I hear most from readers is: Why should we trust the polls this year, when they were wrong in years past?
As many of you will surely recall, polling in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections understated Republican strength. Writing about this year’s polls, Nate Cohn doesn’t beat around the bush: “Let’s state it plainly: It is absolutely possible that the polls could be overestimating Democrats.”
But Nate says there are reasons to believe midterm polling is more reliable.
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Polling did not undercount Republicans in the 2018 or 2022 midterms, he notes, in part because the disengaged voters that polling misses also tend not to vote in these elections.
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And polling techniques have evolved to account for the mistakes of 2016 and 2020. Many pollsters, including The Times and Siena, now rely on new methods of contacting voters and different weighting practices.
That said, polling is by its nature an inexact science. “The only thing that’s guaranteed is that the polls won’t be exactly right,” Nate writes. “They’re just not precise enough.”
One pollster you definitely shouldn’t trust: Wedgewood Polls, which purported to have conducted surveys in several battleground states this year and acknowledged last night that its operation was largely a sham. The admission came after a polling website, FiftyPlusOne, noticed inconsistencies in Wedgewood’s data.
Wedgewood claimed that its fake polls were a social experiment to prove how easy it was to dupe the news media, though some of its activities seem to conflict with that mission — including at least three appeals it made on social media for funding or sponsorship.
Get Caught Up
In the midterms
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Vice President JD Vance defended a contentious attack ad in the Ohio governor’s race — which features the estranged mother of the Democratic candidate, Amy Acton — and slammed Republican criticism of the spot as “whining.” Acton’s opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, plans to spend $4 million to air the ad.
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A coalition of Democrats filed a lawsuit to block the Trump administration from changing how the election is administered. In particular, the suit asks that the federal government not be allowed to order states to disqualify individual voters.
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A new mail-in ballot rule in North Carolina — which requires that both inner and outer envelopes be sealed — could lead to the rejection of thousands of ballots.
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Brad Lander, a Democratic House candidate in New York, was detained by the Israeli military in the West Bank, where he was part of an international delegation harvesting olives alongside Palestinian farmers.
What We’re Watching
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The second debate in the Michigan Senate race between Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee, is tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern. (Follow our live coverage.)
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AIPAC, the country’s leading pro-Israel lobby, plans to give as much as $9 million to a pro-Rogers super PAC.
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Tonight there’s also a debate in the Kansas Senate race, which appears increasingly competitive. I’ll be covering that one.
Number of the Day
$50 million
That’s how much the family of Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire Venezuelan banker, agreed to pay Alina Habba, a lawyer with close ties to Trump, over a four-year span.
Herrera was looking to get a misdemeanor campaign finance violation wiped from his record. Weeks after Habba began working for the family, Trump granted Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.
Crossing the Aisle
In Maine …
Former Senator Joe Manchin, the longtime centrist Democrat turned independent, spent today campaigning with Senator Susan Collins. Collins, a Republican, is in a tough re-election fight against a progressive challenger, Troy Jackson. Manchin praised her as “the most independent-minded person I’ve ever met.”
At one stop, a group of protesters held signs criticizing Collins’s vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who went on to help overturn Roe v. Wade, and calling on her to retire. Manchin shook the demonstrators’ hands and told them that he believed Collins had to remain in the Senate. “That’s the best senator in America,” he said.
In Texas …
Neil Bush, a brother of former President George W. Bush, announced today that he had voted for James Talarico, the Democrat, in Texas’ Senate race.
In a Facebook post, Bush praised Talarico as a “principled, pragmatic leader,” and criticized his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, for helping Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“I have been a Republican for most of my life, and I still believe deeply in many traditional Republican principles,” Bush wrote. “But character matters more than party affiliation.”
ONE LAST THING
A moderate who does nothing in moderation
Who is the dumpling-devouring, 37-year-old Democrat closing in on the governorship in Alaska? Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, known throughout the state as J.K.T., has been a state organizer for a presidential campaign, a mountaineer, an Eagle Scout, a cellist and an extreme runner.
He describes his childhood as “feral”: He sprinted through the woods to school; traveled by ferry and bush plane to sleep on strangers’ couches for track meets; spelunked the storm-water drainage system with friends for fun. He went to Yale, but dropped out to win a seat in the Alaska House.
As a lawmaker, he helped assemble governing coalitions that brought Republicans, Democrats and independents together to run the chamber. Now, Anna Griffin writes, his governor’s race will test whether bipartisan bridge-building is a viable platform for Democrats in red states.
Taylor Robinson contributed to this newsletter.
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