President Trump’s efforts to send National Guard troops to big cities, punish media organizations and pressure universities and private businesses are all unpopular with voters.
But the continued torrent of policies and tactics has not further weakened Mr. Trump’s overall standing, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University. Instead, Mr. Trump continues to retain the support of roughly nine out of 10 Republican voters.
The net result: an unpopular president with an unchanged approval rating of 43 percent.
At the start of his term, Mr. Trump’s approval rating fell from its post-election highs, and it remains weak compared with his predecessors at this point in their presidencies. But over the last several months, his rating has been resilient and stable, reflecting that most voters’ opinions on him have hardened.
The new poll comes as the federal government is racing toward a shutdown on Wednesday, an impasse that has political risks for both Mr. Trump and congressional Democrats.
Voters said they would be likeliest to blame both sides if the government shuts down. But independent voters said they were twice as likely to assign blame to Mr. Trump and Republicans than to Democrats. At the same time, two-thirds of voters warned that Democrats should not shut down the government if their demands are not met.
“It’s like a street gang fight,” Alvaro Olivares Rivera, a 40-year-old veteran who lives in Loveland, Colo., and relies on the Department of Veterans Affairs for disability care, said of the fight between the two parties. “They are being very careless about shutting down the government and are not willing to meet in the middle.”
Mr. Olivares Rivera said that his values are closer to the Republican Party’s but that the Trump administration’s deportation policy had him leaning Democratic. “We are a country in pain and in need, and both sides need to work together,” he added.
But the Democratic base is primed for a fight. More Democratic voters, 47 percent, said the party should shut down the government if their demands were not met than said they should not (43 percent).
Even before a potential shutdown, faith that America’s political system can still solve the country’s problems has faded to a bleak 33 percent. The outlook from independents on that question was as dim as from Democrats.
In many ways, the latest Times/Siena poll reveals the contradictions that have come to define a deeply divided American electorate.
Republicans are increasingly giving Mr. Trump credit for making the economy better — 67 percent said so now, compared with 47 percent in April. At the same time, the broader electorate’s views on the nation’s economic conditions are still sour.
Only 26 percent said the conditions were even good, though that low level represents a slight uptick from 22 percent in the last Times/Siena poll in April.
An open-ended question asking voters to identify the “most important problem” facing the country was even more revealing.
The top issue that Democratic voters, 18 percent of them, identified was Mr. Trump and Republicans — more than those who said they were chiefly concerned with the economy. Nearly as many Republicans, 16 percent, said that Democrats were the nation’s biggest problem.
And independents? Their top concern was polarization and division.
Laurie Maravich, a Democrat, said she was worried about Mr. Trump’s impact on society.
“He can say any ugly thing he wants to about anybody, but if anyone criticizes anything remotely related to him, he wants to silence them or deport them,” said Ms. Maravich, 63, a director of global procurement in Denver, N.C. “He threatens and bullies people to do what he wants.”
There has been a remarkable run of news and developments since the last Times/Siena poll.
Congress has passed Mr. Trump’s signature bill that will cut taxes and make significant cuts to Medicaid. He has imposed, paused and reimposed market-upending tariffs. He has moved to consolidate power over once-independent American institutions, including the Federal Reserve, and pressured universities to change policies. He has deployed National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities, and he has pushed federal officials to investigate and prosecute his political enemies. But on issue after issue, opinions on Mr. Trump are so hardened as to seem almost immovable in either direction.
Voter opinions did not shift beyond the margin of error on the president’s handling of immigration, the economy, trade with other countries, the war between Russia and Ukraine or his management of the federal government.
At the same time, voters repeatedly said Mr. Trump had “gone too far” in a number of his pursuits. For instance, 53 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops into cities went too far compared with only 33 percent who said it had “been about right.”
Similar shares said the same about pressuring colleges and universities to adopt new policies, pressuring businesses to make specific decisions and Mr. Trump’s action on immigration enforcement.
More than 60 percent of voters — including one-quarter of Republicans — worried that Mr. Trump had pushed things too far in pressuring media organizations who cover him unfavorably. Seventy percent of voters under 45 and independents said Mr. Trump had gone too far in cracking down on media companies.
Mr. Trump’s decisions around media organizations proved to be among the most unpopular in the survey. More than half of Republicans — 57 percent — and 77 percent of voters overall opposed the idea of revoking licenses for television stations that criticize Mr. Trump.
“I’m a big believer in free speech,” said Isaiah Moreno, 25, who is from Pueblo, Colo., works at a truck dealership and voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 mainly because of the economy. “Anyone should be able to say what they have on their mind, and I don’t think they should be reprimanded for that.”
More voters (51 percent) said they were concerned that Mr. Trump could use the National Guard to intimidate political rivals than the share who said they were worried about crime in big cities without the Guard’s intervention (42 percent).
Yet on the big-picture question — whether Mr. Trump is exceeding the powers available to him — opinion remained a flat 54 percent who said he was exceeding his authority, both in April and today.
The Republican base, in particular, is embracing Mr. Trump’s exercise of power.
Take the issue of whether independent government agencies should make their own policies. Voters overall said that they should, 63 percent to 29 percent. Yet Republicans said the polar opposite, with 59 percent saying the president should be able to overrule those agencies.
On other issues, the survey reveals a complicated dynamic in voters’ views of Mr. Trump’s policies. In many cases the policies are somewhat popular, even as voters question his administration’s implementation of them.
The president, for instance, received his highest approval ratings in the survey on handling crime (48 percent approval to 47 percent disapproval). Yet voters opposed Mr. Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., by nearly 10 percentage points.
“It is a solution, but I wish it was less forceful,” said Devin Sullivan, 29, an independent in Charlotte, N.C., who leans Republican but does not align with a party, though he supports Mr. Trump’s approach on crime.
It was a similar story for immigration.
A 51 percent majority said the government was mostly deporting people who “should be deported.” And 54 percent of voters said they supported deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally — including nearly 20 percent of Democrats.
At the same time, a slim majority of voters said the Trump administration’s process for deportation had mostly been unfair, and a majority thought Mr. Trump had gone too far on immigration enforcement.
Perhaps the brightest spot in the survey for Mr. Trump was his solidifying support among Republicans on the economy even as voters overall are dubious of his economic stewardship.
About half of Republicans, 51 percent, now say Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them personally, up from 36 percent in April. And 32 percent of voters overall now say he has improved the economy, up from 21 percent in April. The figure remains low overall because independents believe by a 20-point margin that Mr. Trump has made matters worse.
The hypothetical matchup between Democrats and Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections is also unchanged. Both in April and September, 47 percent of voters said they would prefer to vote for a Democrat next year — slightly more than those who said they would prefer a Republican.
Here are the key things to know about this poll from The New York Times and Siena University:
-
The survey was conducted among 1,313 registered voters nationwide from Sept. 22 to 27, 2025.
-
This poll was conducted in English and Spanish, by telephone using live interviewers and by text message. Overall, 99 percent of respondents were contacted on their cellphones. You can see the exact questions that were asked and the order in which they were asked here.
-
Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing us to make sure we reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For this poll, interviewers placed more than 152,000 calls or texts to more than 56,000 voters.
-
To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. You can see more information about the characteristics of respondents and the weighted sample at the bottom of the results and methodology page, under “Composition of the Sample.”
-
The margin of sampling error among the electorate that is likely to vote in November is about plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error.
You can see full results and a detailed methodology here. If you want to read more about how and why the Times/Siena Poll is conducted, you can see answers to frequently asked questions and submit your own questions here.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
Ruth Igielnik is a Times polling editor who conducts polls and analyzes and reports on the results.
The post After Volatile Summer, Trump’s Approval Remains Low but Stable, Poll Finds appeared first on New York Times.
