How popular is Donald Trump?

Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.

Nate Silver

and

Eli McKown-Dawson

May 19, 2025

∙ Paid

549

128

🕒 The latest

Updated May 19, 2025 at 5:19 PM

It’s been another slow week for new polls (maybe because pollsters are at their annual conference). But what we have seen has been good for Donald Trump, at least compared to what his numbers looked like last month. His net approval rating in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll (-8) is up three points from where it was for the last two weeks (-11). And his approval rating is holding steady in the YouGov/Economist poll (-9 this week vs. -10 last week).

The latest RMG Research poll — admittedly a firm with a strong Republican house effect — has Trump above water with a +4 net approval rating (it was tied in their poll last week). RMG also shows much higher approval for Trump’s handling of tariffs (net -1) than most other polls.

As a result of these polls, Donald Trump’s net approval rating is up to -5.8 in the Silver Bulletin average. That’s the highest it’s been since April 22nd, and up almost 4 points from Trump’s second term approval low-point on April 29th. Now this could just be noise driven by a dearth of new polls, or it could be a reversal of the downward trend we’ve seen since the start of Trump’s term. We’ll have to wait for more data to find out. -EMD, 5/16/25

Topline approval

Poll list

Issue approval

Strong vs. weak approval, subgroup approval, and historical averages

Our polling average is the direct descendant of the presidential approval average that Nate designed for FiveThirtyEight. Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here. It adjusts for house effects. And it accounts for uncertainty, estimating the range where new polls might come in.

The topline: So, just how popular is Trump?

Our default average reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the all-adult version of the poll before the registered voter version.2 This is because all Americans have a say in how popular the president is — whether or not they vote.

The polls: What do the surveys say?

Inevitably, there’s a lot of disagreement from survey to survey, not just because of statistical variation but because pollsters have long had trouble pegging down Trump’s popularity — and often underestimated it. So you can see all the numbers here and how house effects work in the model. You can also click here to download every Trump approval poll in our database — including some additional details not shown in the chart below.

Each poll gets an “influence” score based on its pollster rating, its sample size, its recency, and how often a pollster is publishing numbers.3 Sometimes, surveys with mediocre pollster ratings have more weight in the model just because they were conducted very recently or polled more people.

The issues: What do Americans think of Trump’s policies?

Pollsters don’t just ask about Trump’s overall job approval, they also ask about how well he’s dealing with different issues. We’re tracking how the public feels about Donald Trump’s handling of some of the most salient topics: the economy, immigration, trade and tariffs, and the cost of living.

The deep dive

We also have a few features we’re reserving for paying subscribers:

How do Trump’s approval ratings compare to every past president since Truman?
How many voters strongly approve or disapprove of Trump?
What are Trump’s numbers in only polls of adults or only polls of likely and registered voters?

You can find all of that, plus downloadable data on every president’s approval rating every day since 1945, down below.