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In longevity, 50 may be the new 40. But in presidential politics, partisanship has turned a 40 percent job approval rating into the new 50 percent. And Donald Trump just crashed through it.
A raft of new polls suggest the Iran war and its economic fallout have sent Americans’ already-low assessments of how Trump is handling his job even lower. Multiple polling averages, which collate a wide range of surveys and weigh them by each individual pollster’s track record, show the president’s approval ratings slipping below 40 percent for the first time in his second term. Surveys released over the past couple weeks from CNN, YouGov, the Associated Press, and Quinnipiac University now peg his support in the 30s, a nosedive that coincides with the start of the war. Much of that slide has come from the independent, nonwhite, and younger voters who gave Trump the benefit of the doubt in the last election. But even some conservatives are finding less to like these days. Trump began his second term net popular, having capitalized on Americans’ dissatisfaction with inflation and the economy under Democrats. Now, meaningful shares of Republicans give him poor marks on those issues, too. Polls suggest Trump is underwater in more than half the states he won in 2024—including all seven of the swing states he so often brags about having swept.
This polling collapse has understandably provoked some liberal crowing. “Donald Trump is one of the most unpopular presidents at this point in his presidency in history,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said last month on the Senate floor. (By some measures, Trump is actually the most unpopular president ever at this point, narrowly beating out his first-term self.) But if you’re someone who’s regularly refreshing Nate Silver’s Substack to gloat, I have some bad news: Even cratering approval ratings might not do much to dampen Trump’s political fortunes or hasten an end to the war.
There are a few reasons why—some structural, others uniquely Trumpian. On the structural end is political polarization, which has calcified in the U.S. over the past couple decades. Antipathy between Americans who identify as Democrats and those who identify as Republicans seems to have depressed presidential approval ratings overall. With the exception of the honeymoon period at the beginning of a president’s term, lately, there’s little a commander in chief can do to win over the other side’s voters in a lasting way. We may never again see approval numbers in the 70s and 80s, which presidents as varied as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush, and even George W. Bush sometimes enjoyed.
But partisanship also seems to have put guardrails on how low a modern president can go. The sub-30s favorability that some of those same presidents suffered at other points in their terms may be a thing of the past, too. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn has pointed out, overseas quagmires and high prices at home can tank presidents’ approval ratings even with their core supporters. But all of those historical examples come from eras in which partisanship didn’t exert nearly the gravitational pull it does today. Most Republicans and self-described MAGA voters seem unlikely to abandon Trump no matter how poorly things go in Iran.
The design of the U.S. political system also insulates Trump from the consequences of his sinking public standing. Unlike some democratic countries, the U.S. holds elections and sets presidential terms on a constitutionally and legally fixed schedule. Countries with parliamentary governments, like Canada and the United Kingdom, have sometimes seen prime ministers leave office early due to unpopularity. But in those systems, the outgoing prime minister’s party then gets to pick a new, presumably better-liked leader to serve as a replacement. Only one American president has ever resigned, and Richard Nixon did so for reasons that went well beyond bad polls. Even if Trump were to abdicate, the constitutional order of succession would automatically saddle Republicans and the country with his vice president, J.D. Vance, who registers in some recent polls as even less popular. Only something truly cataclysmic—a catastrophic medical event or an act so brazen that two-thirds of senators convict and remove an impeached Trump, something not even the Jan. 6 attack accomplished—would cause this president to leave before his term is up.
Trump’s signature approach to politics offers another shield against his growing unpopularity. Public opinion can sometimes act as a brake on presidential decision-making. As with Franklin Roosevelt abandoning his scheme to pack the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson choosing to forgo running for reelection during the Vietnam War, presidents who run into overwhelming opposition sometimes retreat. Trump, though, has repeatedly shown a willingness to forge ahead on unpopular stands. He’s pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted police officers, renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” signed a bill that cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits to fund tax cuts for the rich, targeted political opponents for prosecution, and slapped tariffs on most imported goods. Launching a broadly disliked war is only the latest example.
Trump does sometimes reverse himself, but it’s falling stock prices, not poll numbers, that explain his tendency to “TACO.” The president also cherry-picks datapoints, calls unflattering polls “fake,” or simply lies. “I’m popular,” Trump insisted to Fox News before the war began, even though it wasn’t true then either. Despite the Iran conflict’s growing unpopularity, Trump continues to insist it’s going well. “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran—they are decimated, both militarily and economically and every other way,” he said in a prime-time address on Wednesday, a low-energy affair that didn’t seem likely to improve his standing.
Yet even if Trump’s very bad polls probably won’t constrain him very much, they could still do a number on his party. Since the 1930s, when modern political polling began, an imperfect but unmistakable correlation has emerged between a president’s job approval and how his party fares in the midterm elections. In short, the higher the better. With Trump’s popularity in the gutter, Democrats have been flipping seats in special elections this year and currently lead in the race for Congress by around 6 points. What’s more, the voters who will turn out this November are apt to be better educated, more politically engaged, and intensely motivated—the kinds of voters who, in the Trump era, have come to favor Democrats. That’s part of how the party was able to stanch its losses in the 2022 midterms, even though Joe Biden was at the time polling only marginally better than Trump is now. This year, a Democratic turnout advantage could magnify, not mitigate, the millstone that is Trump’s unpopularity.
There’s still plenty of uncertainty. Once their approval ratings turned upside down, neither the first-term Trump nor Biden managed to claw their way back to positive territory. But if the war peters out, gas prices fall, or the economy improves, Trump could grow more popular by Election Day. Luck also plays a role. In 2018, Trump’s first midterm, Republicans suffered their worst wipeout in the House since Watergate. But the party gained seats in the Senate, benefiting from a map that happened to put Democrats who represented deep-red states like Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota on the defensive. This year, Democrats will have to defend sitting senators in Georgia and Michigan, states Trump won in 2024, and flip at least four Republican-held seats elsewhere to retake Senate control.
Other political actors also get to choose how they respond to an unpopular president. In 2014, Barack Obama’s second midterm, Democratic candidates in states as relatively blue as Colorado ran away from him; Republicans grew their House majority and flipped the Senate that year, in part by winning that Colorado Senate seat. In 2022, vulnerable Democrats were wary of appearing too cozy with Biden. Republicans, though, may not get that kind of leeway from Trump. In most cases, GOP candidates are actively courting the president, despite his unpopularity. Perhaps they feel that doing so will lure Trump’s supporters to the polls. Or maybe they’re just stuck with a president who’s liable to blast them on Truth Social if they show too much daylight with him. A more conventional president might worry about his party’s future, but there’s little evidence that Trump cares about that at all.
One thing other Republicans are doing, though, is quitting. At last count, 39 congressional Republicans have resigned, declined to seek reelection, or chosen to run for a different office—more than in any other year except 2018, the last time the party faced a midterm under an unpopular President Trump. Sometimes those who can’t raise their voices vote with their feet instead.
