President Donald Trump’s once-steady approval rating is finally taking a plunge.
An aggregation of polls shows that the affordability crisis—and Trump’s failure to prioritize it—is finally catching up to him, with The New York Times reporting that the president is now underwater by 14 percentage points.
Trump’s net approval rating sat around -10 for months, with his ordering of the National Guard into Democratic-led cities, his ICE crackdown, and targeting of his political enemies not causing the figure to budge.
Now, the saying that Americans vote with their wallets is proving true. This appears to be especially the case among independent voters.
A Marquette University Law School poll last month showed that just 31 percent of people who identified as politically independent approved of Trump’s job performance as president. In the same survey conducted in July, that figure was 41 percent.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman told the Times the administration is working to “deliver economic relief for the American people, from signing historic drug pricing deals to securing working-class tax cuts.”
Even right-leaning pollsters are finding that Trump’s key demographics are fleeing him.
A Fox News survey in November found that Trump’s approval among white, college-educated men dropped to 40 percent—down from 47 percent in June. That is a 10-point dip from exit polls during the 2024 general election, which found that Trump won 50 percent of the demographic.
The Times writes that the economy is dragging down Trump’s approval rating “across surveys.” The majority of respondents to a Fox News poll said Trump’s economy hurt them, and three-quarters of Americans polled by Marquette said their grocery costs had gone up in the past year.
The president says that Americans—who are paying more for groceries than they were this time last year—are simply being duped by Democrats. This week, he called the issue of affordability a “fake narrative” and a Democrat-led “con job.”
“They just say the word,” Trump said. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it—affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
Trump’s campaign promise to lower the cost of living for Americans has yet to be kept, and voters have taken notice. Only 26 percent of respondents in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said Trump was doing a good job at managing the cost of living.
Trump still has an approval rating of 91 percent among Republicans, according to the Marquette survey. However, there have been some notable cracks within MAGA.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who was once Trump’s most ardent supporter in Congress, broke from him over disagreements with his foreign policy decisions—like striking nuclear sites in Iran—and concealing the so-called Epstein files. She has also said that “affordability is a problem.”
The Epstein issue has caused other MAGA Republicans, like Rep. Nancy Mace, to break from the president and demand that the files be released to the public. Trump eventually conceded defeat on the issue and gave congressional Republicans the green light to pass a measure requiring their release by Dec. 19.
Trump’s own campaign pollster, John McLaughlin, wrote for Newsmax in November that there are serious red flags for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.
McLaughlin wrote that Democrats now lead the generic congressional ballot 45 percent to 44 percent, marking the first time they have led in their surveys since the 2024 election. That means every pollster tracked by the Times now predicts that Democrats will regain control of Congress next year.
The post Economy Is Finally Tanking Trump’s Approval Rating appeared first on The Daily Beast.
