Dem
54
GOP
46
Another day, another pollster announcing that Donald Trump has hit a record low for their poll. The latest is Fox, where the President is at 36% approval against 64% disapproval, putting him 28 points underwater.
What is remarkable about this election—and we struggle to think of another example across American political history—is the extent to which the damage is self-inflicted. Certainly there are presidents who went down one particular, unpopular, rabbit hole and had it take a sledgehammer to their support. The obvious example here is Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War. But with Trump, it is many and varied rabbit holes, and pretty much all of them were obviously unwise from the moment he started going down them.
Indeed, as bad as his approval rating is, the more remarkable number—and we are not the only ones to notice this—is 80%. Trump has somehow managed to end up on the wrong side of many issues where 80% of voters (or more) are against him, and 20% of voters (or fewer) are with him. Things rarely get this lopsided in American politics, and yet he's managed to pull it off, time and again, and just weeks before an election. Let's run down half a dozen examples:
Corruption: We'll start here, because our numbers are from the aforementioned Fox poll. As bad as Trump's approval rating is in that poll, the real eye-opening number is this: 88% of respondents were extremely/very concerned about corruption in government. That made corruption the top issue on the list of concerns, ahead of inflation (85%), gas prices (83%), health care (80%), the Iran War (75%) or crime (73%). Do you know how corrupt you have to be to make voters worry more about that than how they're going to afford to feed their family tonight?
As if on cue, shortly after the Fox poll dropped, The Washington Post revealed that it had laid hands on the (previously secret) list of people and entities that donated money for the Trump ballroom. Leading the way are the Adelson family ($25 million), Apple Computer ($25 million), Charlie Ergen/Dish Network ($25 million), Nvidia ($25 million), Laura and Isaac Perlmutter ($20.2 million), Lockheed Martin ($10 million), Microsoft ($10 million), Rocket Lending ($10 million) and Palantir (AI) Technologies ($10 million). None of these people/entities care one bit about Trump's balls. They are all very obviously buying and paying for something, whether it's aid to Israel (Adelson family), tariff exceptions (Apple), government contracts (Lockheed Martin), reduced oversight (Rocket Lending) or something else. Missing from the list is one Donald John Trump, who promised that he would be paying for most of the ballroom out of his own pocket.
Inflation: Obviously, Trump did not choose inflation directly. But he did choose to impose arbitrary and protectionist tariffs, and he did choose to attack Iran. Both of those things were 100% guaranteed to trigger inflation, and they have. The September numbers were reported this week, and inflation rose to 3.7%. That's bad on two levels for Trump; first because it's a pretty high number, second because voters tend to be particularly unhappy if they think things are headed in the wrong direction.
Trump may have figured out, at this point, that he can't tame the economy through force of will. Certainly not in the less than 3 weeks before Election Day. And so, he's chosen the only option he thinks he has left: baldfaced lies. At his rallies, he is claiming there is barely any inflation at all right now, just 1.7%. He also says that is much better than the 19% inflation of the Biden years. It is true that 1.7% inflation is better than 19% inflation (unless you are in debt), but all the rest of that is a fantasy. And when reporters ask the White House questions about where these numbers are coming from, the administration refuses to answer.
In the end, people know how much they are paying for groceries or for gas. And despite Trump's gas-inspired gaslighting, he is taking a beating on this issue. According to the latest from AP/NORC, voters disapprove of Trump's handling of cost of living, 82% to 17%. Other polls have similar results; we're just trying to work as many different pollsters into this item as we can, to make clear it's not just one house that has bad news for Trump.
Livestreamed Execution: We are still stunned that the administration thought that Pete Hegseth's snuff film would meet the approval of the American public. And we were right to feel that way, as the newest Washington Post/Ipsos poll indicates. Exactly 80% of respondents opposed the livestream of Nidal Hasan's execution, as opposed to 18% who like the idea.
We don't know if Trump pays attention to (or even hears about) adverse polls these days. He may only be advised of whatever positive polls that Natalie Harp can find and print out on her mobile printer. But we suspect he got more than an earful from Republicans in Congress, who surely told him that such a display would be a gift to radical Islamist groups and their recruiting efforts. And so, Trump has now called off the livestream. That will reduce the damage done by this decision, which was both foolhardy and sadistic, but it won't erase it entirely.
The Ads: We have written several times, at this point, about the government-funded ads that are being framed as public service announcements, but are really just Republican campaign ads. Following a backlash, Trump said he would pay for the ads himself, and then he changed his mind. Then, a judge ordered the administration to stop airing the ads until all legal challenges can be resolved, and the administration "accidentally" kept airing them, due to a "miscommunication."
They are finally off the air, and will presumably remain so beyond November 3, unless there's another "accident." In any event, Trump certainly seems to have done himself and the Republicans more harm than good here. A Reuters/Ipsos poll reported that voters found them inappropriate by a margin of 89%-9%.
Trump Ocean: This is a stupid one, but still instructive. Speaking at a rally this week, Trump suggested that now that he's renamed a gulf and a lake (the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, respectively), the time has come to rename an ocean. And while he likes the idea of renaming either the Pacific or the Atlantic as the American Ocean, he might like the idea of renaming them as the Trump Ocean even better.
We recognize that Trump might have been making a joke here. Might. But we are also 100% certain that, whether he is serious or not, he has absolutely thought about this possibility. More importantly, humor is in the eye of the beholder, and what really matters is if the voting public takes it as a joke. Given the previous adventures in renaming, we think they will not. And while nobody has polled the American Ocean/Trump Ocean yet, around 80% of the people who have an opinion oppose the recent renaming of Lake Ontario. Hard to imagine that renaming an entire ocean, particularly if Trump tries to rename it after himself, would be more popular.
Siegfried, Roy and Trump: We can't find any polls on this one, because it's pretty recent. And, truth be told, we don't know if there will be any. However, it's another stupid, unforced error, so we're including it here. A young man named William Chapman suffered from mental illness. Somehow he ended up in the tiger enclosure at a wildlife park in the U.K. and was mauled to death. Exactly how and why this happened remains unclear, but some footage of Chapman and the tiger (taken before the fatal damage was done, but while the tiger was on the attack) has been posted online.
Donald Trump, in one of his late-night posting sprees, re-posted the footage to his social media platform for sadists, accompanied by the comment "Don't ever mess with nature!" And the reason that Trump did that was so people would get the reference when the President posted a second video, made by AI, in which he takes Chapman's place. In the second video, Trump wrestles with the tiger a bit, then effectively tames it, then he and the tiger share a hug. And in case you think it couldn't get tackier, the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" plays in the background. We're not going to embed the video, because ick, but if you want to see the original post to confirm we're not making it up, it's here. And if you want to see the later, AI-generated video, it's here.
To us, at least, this brings to mind the occasion when Trump mocked a disabled reporter. That was ugly enough that people still remember it, even when hundreds of other vulgar acts have faded from memory. And that reporter did not die, whereas the tiger-attack victim did.
Given how regularly Trump keeps shooting himself in the foot, well, it's no wonder it's given rise to conspiracy theories that he's actively trying to lose the election. We don't know about that, but we do know that he's giving the Democrats all kinds of ammunition to work with, enough that each candidate running for office can tailor things to suit the needs of their constituency.
We will add one other thing. Politico had a piece yesterday headlined "The GOP's midterm lifeline: Maybe the polls are wrong." The subhead was: "Part of the challenge is no one knows what the midterm electorate will look like, making it hard to know if the polling is accurate."
This is true, as far as it goes. And you're probably going to see more than a few pieces like this in the next couple of weeks, because it's one of the only angles left. That said, we want to point out that the polling misses of the last decade or so have come when Trump was on the ballot, and not in midterms. So, the missteps of 2016, in particular, should not be given undue weight. And the missteps of 2020 and 2024 were actually nowhere near as bad (with a few exceptions), because pollsters had already begun to adjust for the "Trump Effect."
More importantly, guessing how an election will turn out is tough, because there are a lot of moving pieces. A pollster has to guess what the electorate will look like, has to figure out how a respondent plans to vote, has to judge how serious they are about that choice, has to assess how serious they are about making sure to actually vote, etc. There are a lot of things that could go wrong there.
By contrast, polling questions like "How do you feel about inflation?" and "Do you approve of killing someone live on the Internet?" are actually easier, because there are fewer variables in play. And, as you can see, these simpler questions paint a grim picture for Trump (and, by extension, his political party). At the moment, 4-in-5 voters are against him on a LOT of stuff. Not all of those 4-in-5 will vote Democratic, as some will decide the Democrats are even worse, while others will decide that they should not blame [non-Trump Republican X] for the sins of the president. But a lot of them will. And the real point here is that the "Do you approve?" polls are saying the same thing as the "Who will win the election?" polls. That is strong evidence that the "Who will win the election?" polls are on the right track. (Z)