President Donald Trump's approval rating has fallen to just 40% in The New York Times’ polling average—an abysmally low number that marks the lowest level of his second term.
Trump’s approval rating is so bad that right-wing pollster Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports said that if Trump and former President Joe Biden were to face off in a rematch today, Biden would win. After all, multiple polls show that voters say Biden did a better job as president than Trump is doing now.
It's hard to pinpoint just one reason why Trump’s approval rating is sinking. It's likely a confluence of multiple things.
First, Americans remain unhappy with the cost of living in the United States, disapproving of Trump's inflationary tariffs and his general stewardship of the economy, which is working well for the richest few but not for everyone else.
Americans are also repulsed with Trump's roving bands of immigration goons, who have been lawlessly abducting people off the street and beating, shooting, and even killing people who protest their illegal conduct.
People gather for a memorial honoring Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent, in Minneapolis, on Feb. 7.
Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, as well as his newfound imperialist streak of threatening to bomb and invade foreign nations.
To fall to such a low approval rating, it means Trump is losing the support of people who voted him back into office in 2024.
Indeed, polling analyst G. Elliott Morris wrote that Trump is now losing the low-information voters who helped put him in the White House.
"According to our poll, low-knowledge voters backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024. Now, however, the same low-knowledge voters say they disapprove of the president by 13 points—a 25-point shift away from the president," Morris wrote.
Morris went on to explain why that’s so dangerous for Republicans in the November midterms, when voters have a chance to voice their distaste with Trump's policies by punishing his party at the ballot box.
Over the long term, this all means voters who are habitually disengaged are more likely to vote based on the general conditions and direction of the country. When consumer sentiment is as low as it is now, that means incumbent parties are in danger.
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Trump won in 2024 in large part because ~one-quarter of the electorate wasn’t paying enough attention to his promises to know much about what he’d do as president. Now that they are seeing the results—especially on prices—they are just as anti-Trump as voters who spend all day consuming political news.
Indeed, Republicans are privately fretting about losing their majorities in the House and even the Senate. An unnamed GOP senator told the media outlet Semafor that Republicans are “going to lose the midterms.”
Still, Republican lawmakers are still sticking by Trump and defending his worst policies. Just six of the 218 Republicans in the House voted on Wednesday to rescind Trump’s idiotic tariffs on Canada. And Republicans are defending his immigration gestapo, even as voters say they have taken things too far.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ’em.
Of course, at the end of the day, Trump's approval rating should be much, much lower than 40%. No one should support such a vile, corrupt, egomaniacal lunatic whose malignant narcissism and sociopathy make him unafraid to trample on our most basic rights.
Yet the fact that his support is dropping is notable, and a clear sign that Democrats will have a good November.
