Trump’s Approval Ratings Have Hit a New Low

Afunny thing happened to our political blowhard class on its way to its next appointed bout of savvy prognosticating. As breathless pundits looked to this week’s handful of off-year elections for telltale signs of the country’s mood swings, the news broke that President Donald Trump has reached a new low in his national approval ratings. In a CNN poll released Monday, 63 percent of respondents disapproved of his performance in office, leaving just 37 percent approving. As polling analyst G. Elliot Morris notes, the 26 point net gap in disapproval is the lowest Trump has ever clocked—even in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when many observers predicted his political demise. By comparison, an enfeebled and marginalized Joe Biden sported a 40 percent approval rating when he left office. A plurality of 42 percent approval would show Trump holding on to the 2024 coalition that elected him, but this latest swoon indicates that independents and even traditional GOP supporters are turning against him. Meanwhile, The Economist’s poll tracker shows that Trump’s approval is underwater in all seven of the swing states he carried last November, as well as in Texas. That’s right: The state that’s frantically (and secretively) redrawing its congressional maps to suit Trump’s whims—and has even filed an actual lawsuit against Tylenol based on Trump and RFK Jr.’s fabricated claims that the pain suppressant promotes autism in utero—has soured on Trump’s agenda.

It’s easy to make too much of snapshot surveys of presidential approval, but, as Morris also notes, polling averages have been trending strongly away from Trump over the past two weeks. The intensity of that disapproval is also striking: “Depending on the polls you pick for your average,” Morris writes, “between 46 and 50 percent of U.S. adults tell pollsters they “strongly disapprove” of the job Trump is doing as president. That is double the percent that strongly approve…. Put another way, less than half of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 currently ‘strongly approve’ of his presidency.” When you factor in disapproval among respondents who didn’t vote in the last election, the MAGA picture gets grimmer still, with less than a third of American adults approving of Trump, and 53 percent disapproving—48 percent of them doing so “strongly.”

All of this would, you would think, represent a massive opportunity for Democrats as they gear up for next year’s critical midterm balloting. A weak and unpopular president, abetted by a supine congressional GOP leadership, has only strengthened the 1 percent’s oligarchic grip on our political economy, while menacing working-class immigrants and cities and states with Democratic political leaders, all the while brazenly enriching himself and his family at the public’s expense. The guy hosted a Great Gatsby–themed Halloween party at his gilded resort home, replete with scantily clad models in oversize cocktail glasses and tableside bump-and-grind dancers, just as SNAP food assistance was expiring for as many as 42 million Americans. (Trump and his party planners didn’t seem to notice that the novel they were memorializing brutally condemned the blind hubris of a former mobster desperate to repeal the logic of history, as he courted the wife of a Jazz Age groyper.) This should not be all that hard for a robust and motivated opposition party to smite down as a sign of the country’s contemptuous takeover by a self-enriching gangster syndicate.

Yet we’re talking about the Democrats here. In the midst of Trump’s free fall, yet another centrist Democratic messaging shop produced yet another report promoting a don’t-frighten-the-horses mandate. In our manically right-shifting political discourse, the moderate-minded WelcomePAC intends to keep candidates for the party stalwartly aligned with the muddled middle. That call to armlessness replicates the message of still another ballyhooed new Democratic think tank senselessly peddling moderate talking points in an age of populist confrontation and negative polarization. Ezra Klein at The New York Times echoed the same played-out formula, because he had a deadline to meet. At a moment when the GOP is dismantling basic regulatory safeguards against monopoly, environmental degradation, and rampaging inequality, Democratic thought leaders in Klein’s circle have fulsomely embraced his Abundance agenda of… still more rampant deregulation and market prostration.

Among other things, the Democrats’ unimaginative posturing on these issues marks a basic misreading of the country’s disenchantment with Trump. That same CNN poll shows a whopping 72 percent of respondents saying that the economy is in “poor shape,” with 61 percent saying that Trump’s economic policies have made things worse. Democrats have taken an important step toward promoting that fundamental message in holding the line on the government shutdown and pushing for a deal in Congress to reverse the punishing increases in ACA healthcare premiums that the GOP enacted as part of Trump’s signature tax-and-spending legislation.

Yet the party needs to dramatically expand the playing field on issues of political economy if it has any hope of a strong showing in the midterms. Democrats haven’t effectively targeted the role of the crypto industry—which was the largest source of campaign donations in the 2024 election cycle, and is again looming as the GOP’s main cash connection in the midterms—in underwriting Trump’s agenda of government by bribery. (Indeed, Democratic lawmakers collecting crypto donations voted in favor of the comically titled GENIUS Act, which has lifted regulations curbing the industry’s grifting business model.) They haven’t productively called out the ruinous effects of an AI bubble that now accounts for 40 percent of the country’s growth in GDP, or the cartel powers of regional transmission organizations, which are now causing energy bills to spike.

In part, this is because Democrats are courting many of the same big-ticket donors as the Republicans do, which blunts their credibility as crusaders for antitrust and economic democracy. Kamala Harris was the most recent avatar of this weakness, as she tried to galvanize working-class and rural voters while leaning on the counsel of her Uber-executive brother-in-law Tony West and signaling to donors that she’d consider ditching Biden’s head of the FCC, Lina Khan, who had compiled an impressive record of actually enforcing antitrust law. But more fundamentally, the party clings to the security blanket of centrist messaging thanks to its core managerial ethos. Ever since Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council pointedly shunned the party’s New Deal agenda and rebranded the Democrats as a “party of business,” it has been at a loss to revive any economic populist program in the centers of Democratic policy debate. As a result of these shifts, Democratic congressional districts have eclipsed Republican ones in per capita income for the past 15 years, wiping out the party’s modern advantages among working-class voters. The popular equation of the Democratic Party with elite governance is now so advanced that, per a recent study by the Center for Working Class politics, even candidates in the party aligned with economic populist measures suffer a significant electoral penalty simply on the basis of their party affiliation. Sampling opinion in Rust Belt states, the study found a sobering trend:

In head-to-head tests, Democratic candidates underperformed their independent counterparts by over 8 points, even when delivering the exact same economic populist message. This “Democratic penalty” was largest among working-class, Latino, rural, and swing voters, and is more than enough to lose competitive elections across the region.

This is anything but a prescription for the Democratic Party to stay the course—but the party’s leaders are mostly oblivious to these blaring warning sirens. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s inauguration early this year by jetting off to Silicon Valley to reassure big-ticket donors there that the Democrats would continue hewing to the center. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is even more hopeless on issues of political economy—which is scarcely surprising, since Silicon Valley and Wall Street double as a full-employment plan for his family. Both men studiously avoided acknowledging democratic socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdami’s mayoral candidacy in their home state of New York, with Jeffries delivering a grudging 11th-hour message approving of his party’s candidate, and Schumer bypassing an endorsement altogether, even failing to say on Election Day whether he’d backed his own party’s mayoral candidate.

This, mind you, is the same major party that reflexively sidesteps comment on Trump’s brownshirt campaign of mass deportation, and the federal takeover of law enforcement in major cities on the grounds that such measures are intended to distract the public’s attention from “kitchen-table issues.” Yet Mamdani has been laser-focused on those same issues, and unlike his betters atop the party’s chain of command, has advanced serious proposals to address them, instead of phoned-in rhetoric. That could be a teachable moment for a party leadership that’s been almost comically averse to seizing on the all-too-plain weaknesses of a flailing Trump presidency. Yet that’s the least likely outcome for a party of managers awkwardly posturing as the tribunes of the American worker.