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Donald Trump has never polled well. While in office, in the Real Clear Politics job approval averages, he has never cracked 50 percent, save for a brief period at the beginning of his second term. His average favorability rating—which, unlike job approval, is measured while out of office—never has at all.
But in a polarized era, in elections including third-party candidates determined by the Electoral College and not the popular vote, keeping these numbers above 45 percent has been for Trump—shall we say—good enough for government work. About three weeks before his 2024 presidential victory, Trump managed to push his favorability rating above 45 percent for the first time since the spring of 2022. And Trump kept both his job approval and favorability numbers above 45 percent throughout this year.
Until now.
Trump’s favorables dipped below 45 percent in August and have tracked around 44 percent since then. More striking is the decline in Trump’s job approval rating since the run-up to the shutdown. Since September 21, the president’s approval rating has declined by four points, from 46.3 to 42.3 percent.
The low 40s is where Trump was for most of his first term. During the midterm election year of 2018, Trump largely held steady at 43 percent, ticking up to 44 just before Election Day, with his favorability lower at 42 percent. Then Republicans got clobbered in House races, losing 40 seats and control of the chamber.
Trump actually cleared 45 percent in the spring of 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But he squandered that goodwill with his response to the murder of George Floyd and his bizarre public health messages, sending his job approval down to 41 percent in July 2020, partially recovering to 44 percent through most of October before losing re-election. (Technically, in the RCP average, Trump passed the 45 percent threshold the day before the November 3 election, but that calculation appears to have been based on a relatively small number of polls sampled in very late October.)
Of course, with a year before the midterm elections, Trump has time to regain three points or more and give the GOP a puncher’s chance to hold the House next year. And to get there, he’s hardly above gimmicky ideas—recently, he mused about $2,000 government checks sent to most Americans.
Yet what should unnerve Republicans is that Trump’s second-term agenda is already firmly in place—including tariffs, deportations, civil servant layoffs, and the One Big Beautiful Bill—and the public is unimpressed. Only 36 percent of Americans say the country is on the “right track,” down seven points since June.
Despite entering office on a promise of cutting prices, the most recent poll from The Economist/YouGov asked voters what their most important issue is and—surprise, surprise—the number one response is “inflation/prices.” Trump may have flinched from his most extreme tariff proposals, but tariff revenue has still more than doubled this year, and that’s a tax hike on us all.
The next two top issues for voters are “jobs and the economy” and “health care.” The unemployment rate remains relatively low, but concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of work are widespread. And Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, didn’t help matters on CNBC yesterday when he praised the state of the labor market by claiming, “firms are finding that AI is making their workers so productive that they don’t necessarily have to hire the new kids out of college and so on.” Unlike Hassett, most people think it’s a bad thing that AI is making it harder for college graduates to enter the workforce.
And then there’s health care, which, as I noted last week, is poised to derail the GOP’s midterms once again. Trump and the GOP hoped voters would applaud the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill. But its cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are inflicting real harm on working-class households. Granted, some of these cuts are delayed until after the midterm, but spikes in premiums are already happening. Republican policies are exacerbating the problem, and Republican politicians have no consensus plan that would undo the damage.
Trump’s best issue in polls is immigration, but that’s only the seventh most important issue to voters. And “best” is relative. According to the RCP averages, approval of Trump’s handling of immigration is slightly underwater. Plus, we have hard evidence of immigration backfiring on Republicans among swing voters. Consider Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 291 votes in 2024. Bolts reported that the incumbent Bucks County Sheriff, Republican Fred Harran, lost re-election this month by 11 points to a Democrat who attacked his eager partnering with ICE.
We also saw immigration play a big role in the Aurora, Colorado city council elections. Denver’s Fox News affiliate reported, “Aurora has long been led by a conservative-leaning council and has a Republican mayor, but voters in Colorado’s most diverse city, which was thrust under a national spotlight on immigration enforcement, rejected three conservative incumbent council members and elected progressives in their places … One of the [defeated] incumbents, Danielle Jurinsky, had made a name for herself aligning with President Donald Trump on immigration issues, calling attention to what they had called a takeover of the city by Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.”
That’s what happened downballot this month when Trump’s job approval sank below 45 percent. Without a change in trajectory, expect more Republican carnage on Election Day 2026.
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