We're tracking more data on Trump's popularity

An old pattern has re-emerged: his haters are increasingly more passionate than his supporters.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added two new features to our Trump approval ratings dashboard. First, we’re now tracking his approval ratings on a series of issues that have been especially salient early on in his presidency: the economy, immigration, trade/tariffs, and inflation¹:

As you can see, the issue approval pattern from Trump’s first term — when the economy was generally his strongest issue, but he was often fighting losing battles on the “culture wars” — has somewhat reversed. This time around, immigration is one of Trump’s least bad topics, although his numbers have nevertheless declined. However, the economy is a considerably bigger liability.

We also hope this data can be helpful in understanding the causes behind the fluctuations in Trump’s overall job approval rating. The main story over the course of Trump’s first 100+ days in office has been the relatively steady decline in his popularity. After Trump’s first week in office, his net approval rating was +7.2. Now, it’s basically the mirror image of that: -7.3. That’s worse than every other president in our historical database except for Trump 1.0.

Still, there’s been a slight rebound in Trump’s numbers over the past week. Might that be because he’s struck a more conciliatory tone on tariffs?² The stock market has liked the change in vibes and maybe that’s improving voters’ mood, too. (We suspect that some voters may be relatively sensitive to stock prices.) That’s what this sort of data can help discern. As you can see in the chart, there’s been an uptick in his ratings on trade. And his economic approval has stabilized over the past couple of weeks.

Strong vs. soft approval

Also, we’re now monitoring how many voters strongly approve or disapprove of Trump, as opposed to somewhat approve or disapprove. As you’ll see, these numbers have become lopsided; there are more Trump haters than lovers at the moment:

On Feb. 1, essentially the same number of Americans strongly approved and disapproved of Trump. Now, strong disapprovers outnumber strong approvers by about a 3-to-2 ratio. It’s hard not to see this as bearish for Trump: his negatives are more entrenched than his positives. His net approval rating among voters with strong views on his presidency is now -14.5, considerably worse than his overall standing of -7.3.

But are these polls accurate?

Of course, that’s if you trust the polls, a subject we’ve covered many times over the years. Since this is intended to be a short newsletter, we’ll just touch on that briefly. There is a modest correlation between pollsters’ historical bias and where they now show Trump’s numbers. (By bias, we mean statistical bias: the extent to which polls miss in the same direction and consistently underestimate Democrats or Republicans.)

Still, this is not exactly surprising: all it’s really showing is that pollsters that have tended to be biased toward Republicans in the past show Trump doing better, while those with a Democratic bias have him doing worse. Pollster house effects have been persistent from cycle to cycle, in other words. If anything, in fact, pollsters are getting more self-conscious about their relative position in the polling landscape, i.e., how they line up relative to other polls. We don’t love that — it’s a fine line between this sort of thing and herding. Unless pollsters are conducting surveys on behalf of campaigns, we don’t think they should think of themselves as Trump-leaning pollsters or anti-Trump pollsters, shaping a media narrative, as much as simply focusing on being as accurate as possible.

Nonetheless, it’s probably fair not to be too critical of GOP-leaning pollsters when they’ve often been more accurate in the past three presidential elections. As a result, these pollsters frequently have higher pollster ratings and therefore receive more weight in our approval ratings calculations.

The difference between election polling and approval polling is that with the former, there’s ultimately an empirical test of accuracy: people go out and vote, and we can compare those results against the polls. With other types of surveys — issue polling or approval rating numbers — there usually isn’t any hard data to compare them against. Instead, any inferences are more indirect. Special elections and Republicans’ fears of putting even seemingly safe Trump seats in play provide one hint, although Democrats have consistently overperformed in those races for the past several years because of lopsided turnout in their favor. Consumer data might also provide a proxy for how Americans feel about Trump’s handling of the economy, although there too, there’s been a split between “soft” data like consumer confidence numbers and “hard” data like consumer spending.

We’d also note that midterm elections haven’t upheld the pattern of polling error from presidential years, with polling being largely unbiased and quite accurate in 2018 and 2022. And incidentally, the pattern of Trump’s strong disapproval numbers exceeding his strong approval ratings isn’t anything new: we also saw that consistently in his first term, especially during his first two years in office. That pattern resulted in Democrats picking up 41 House seats in the 2018 midterms. It’s always possible that pollsters are missing Trump voters, but if they don’t show up to vote, that won’t matter for Republicans next year.

In fact, we’ll have a way-too-early look at next year’s Senate landscape ready for you soon. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, for one, is acting like next year could be rough for Republicans, announcing on Monday that he’ll decline to pursue a Senate bid. In the meantime, we’ll update our Trump approval dashboard pretty much every day that new numbers are out.

1. Sometimes referred to in polls as the “cost of living.”

2. Well, apparently except when it comes to the movie industry.