Dem
53
Ties
2
GOP
45
Donald Trump says he doesn't care that his polling numbers are cratering due to the tariffs, the Iran War, the corruption, etc. This is a flat-out lie; there is no chance that someone as vain and as image-obsessed as he is can look at his crummy poll numbers and just roll with the punches.
At this point, every reader of this site knows well that his approval rating is likely somewhere in the high 30s. Not quite the Bush line, but not far off, and not good for a president about to lead his party into a critical midterm election. Actually, it's possible he's below the Bush line; the AP's latest, released yesterday, puts him at 31%. This is the fourth major poll in the last 2 weeks to put him below the Bush line (32%). That said, those polls might be leading indicators, and they might just be outliers. For the record, here's Trump's average among the major aggregators:
| Pollster | Approve | Disapprove | Undecided | Net |
| Ballotpedia | 39.0% | 60.0% | 1.0% | -21.0% |
| CNN | 35.0% | 64.0% | 1.0% | -29.0% |
| Decision Desk HQ | 38.1% | 59.8% | 2.1% | -21.7% |
| FiftyPlusOne | 35.0% | 62.1% | 2.9% | -27.1% |
| NBC News | 39.0% | 59.0% | 2.0% | -20.0% |
| Real Clear Politics | 38.8% | 59.9% | 1.3% | -21.1% |
| Silver Bulletin | 37.7% | 59.9% | 2.4% | -22.2% |
| The Economist | 35.0% | 61.0% | 4.0% | -26.0% |
| The New York Times | 37.0% | 60.0% | 3.0% | -23.0% |
| RacetotheWH | 36.4% | 61.1% | 2.5% | -24.7% |
| Average | 37.2% | 60.6% | 2.2% | -23.6% |
So yeah, he's probably not really in the low 30s yet, but he's certainly making a move on the mid-30s.
Arguably, however, the worst numbers are not the topline results, and instead are found in the crosstabs. Let us imagine that a person really likes how Trump "owns the libs" and also how he's cracking down on immigrants, but that they're also really upset that gas and milk are so expensive. The economy is generally the biggest driver of votes, so someone like that could very plausibly "approve" of Trump, and yet vote against the Republicans in November. That is especially true since it's not his name that will be on the ballot, so a person doesn't necessarily have to cope with the cognitive dissonance of "I still like Trump, but I also want to vote for change."
The point here is that while Trump's overall approval ratings are grim, his approval ratings on the economy are even grimmer, and that might actually be the more important number. We'll take the aforementioned AP poll as an example: Only 26% of respondents approve of his handling of the economy. And he gets virtually no "rescue" from people who are undecided or have no opinion. That's only 1% of the sample; fully 73% have an opinion on the Trump economy, and it's negative. That's absolutely brutal, and while the AP poll was a bit worse for him than most, they all have very similar numbers when it comes to Trump and the economy.
As we have noted many times, including this week, Trump has concluded there's only one solution here, and that is to fire up the base and get them to the polls in force. We wrote about the taxpayer-funded campaign ads he's been running. And yesterday, the White House announced that he has expanded his campaign itinerary for the next month to 17 states. In case readers are interested, they are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. He's going to hit most of the "swingy" Senate states, although not all of them (no Maine or Minnesota, for example). We don't know why he's going to Alabama or Oklahoma, except that he loves to rally before enthusiastic crowds.
Trump is right that the Republicans really need MAGA voters to behave as if he is on the ballot. The problem with his strategy, which we have also pointed out many times, is that when he is this unpopular, his presence is likely to motivate more Democrats and independents to vote against him and the GOP than it will motivate MAGA types to vote for him and the GOP. There are, after all, considerably more of the former than the latter. Whether Trump simply cannot understand the dynamics here, or he can understand them but he's in denial that he could be so unpopular as to actually motivate people to vote against him, we do not know.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is also hitting the road for a whirlwind tour of states. His list is: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. We suspect that Johnson will actually be much more helpful than Trump will. The Speaker is liked/hated/unknown to voters in roughly equal measure, so he's not likely to move the needle much in terms of vote totals. However, when a candidate appears with him, it's an excellent fundraising opportunity. And Johnson lets the candidate keep the money, whereas Trump claims most of the money HE raises for himself and his PACs. Certainly, if we were Republicans running for office, we'd much rather have Johnson for a few hours than Trump. (Z)