Trump enters perilous polling territory, raising questions over base support
WASHINGTON— Facing a persistent cost-of-living crisis and an unpopular war with Iran, President Trump reached a dangerous turning point last week. 34% approval rate a record low figure less than halfway through his second term, according to a top poll.
The results mark one of the sharpest electoral collapses of any modern president. Data from the Economist and YouGov puts Trump back at his political nadir, matching a figure he hasn’t seen since the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack five years ago.
in progress some other surveys A recently released photo showing the president entering volatile political territory nearly six months before the midterm elections is setting off alarm bells in Republican campaign offices across the country about the party’s fall prospects.
It has also led pollsters to question long-held assumptions about the president’s support base and wonder whether he is at risk of losing that support.
“It’s harder to go lower, but it’s possible, depending on what you do,” said Christopher Wlezien, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “You’ll have to eat its essence to lower that number.”
Trump’s support base remains strong, reinforcing a long-standing theory among pollsters that partisanship now serves as a direct proxy for presidential approval. But a softening of Republican support on certain policy issues, including voters’ priorities such as the economy, has begun to raise questions among experts about whether further erosion is possible.
A New York Times poll found his approval at 38%, and a Politico poll noted a similar erosion; A majority of Americans, including 18% of Trump supporters, said they were worse off financially before he took office.
Approximately 2 in 3 Americans oppose the war Trump started with Iran. The coalition that brought him back to office, including growing support from Latinos, independent voters and young voters, has virtually disappeared.
While the downward trend may seem like the story of a presidency in constant trouble, political scientists see a more complex picture.
“Polarization has raised the floor and lowered the ceiling on approval ratings,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Dramatic swings are less common because approval ratings are now pegged to partisanship.”
The comparison with George W. Bush, whose numbers soared after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and dropped to the mid-20s after Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war, is instructive about how polarization has shifted under Trump.
Bush ran a country that had the ability to rally together for or against a president in response to major events. Rottinghaus argues that Americans are no longer influenced in this way in their views of the president.
“Approval ratings today are increasingly becoming a measure of who the president is rather than what the president has done,” he said.
Trump, in his own way, seems to confirm this dynamic. When he was challenged on his standing with the public or when a Republican lawmaker broke with him over a policy issue, he made the case that he and the MAGA movement were inseparable. In other words, to oppose any decision it makes is to oppose the movement itself.
“I’m MAGA. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do,” Trump said. He said in an interview with NBC News in January: when asked whether his base supports long-term military interventions abroad.
Rottinghaus compared questions about the president’s approval to being “the same as asking if you’re a Republican.”
“Then why do you ask?” he said.
Gallup, the organization that has tracked presidential approval for eight decades, announced earlier this year that it would stop publishing approval ratings of individual political figures; It’s a change 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 in which Gallup can make its most significant contribution,” the spokesperson added.
