Dem
47
GOP
53
One swallow does not a summer (or winter) make and all that, but a new Gallup poll puts Donald Trump's approval at 36% and his disapproval at 60%. This is a terrible sign for the Republicans, who have hitched their wagon to him. If more polls from other reputable pollsters confirm an approval rating in the mid-thirties, the House is lost next year and maybe the Senate. But first we want to see more polls confirm this.
The drop since October is largely due to independents and Republicans. With independents, Trump is down from 33% approval to 25%. With Republicans he is down from 91% to 84%. Among Democrats, there isn't much to lose since they all hate him already.
By way of comparison, in 2017, Trump's job approval averaged 38%. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats flipped 41 House seats. That is less likely now due to the even more extensive gerrymandering, but who knows? Some of the gerrymanders could be based on unrealistic models of how Black voters, Latino voters and young voters will vote. In that case, they could turn out to be dummymanders.
An approval of 36% is not the all-time low for Trump. That was 34%, after the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021. However, it is a record for Trump v2.0, which started with an approval of 48%.
Here are his approval numbers on specific issues:
His best issue is crime. Republicans always do well on crime, so this is not surprising. Doing well on foreign affairs? What does that mean? He is doing very poorly on the Middle East (33%) and even worse on Ukraine (31%). What is it that voters really like? Relations with Saudi Arabia? We doubt it and question whether this question is actually measuring anything. Two issues Trump cares about a lot, immigration and the economy, are in the mid-30s. Health care is at 30%. Not much good news here. All Trump can hope for is that this poll used a bad model of the electorate and is not a good representation. (V)