After a spate of bad polls earlier this summer, President Trump simply declared that they were not true. “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN,” he wrote on social media, using capital letters as if they would shout away any contrary data.
In fact, his real poll numbers are at or near the lowest they have ever been in some nonpartisan surveys. A flurry of new samples in recent days found that Mr. Trump is at the nadir of his presidency, with support from just around a third of Americans as a stalemated war in Iran and high gas prices take a political toll.
The latest surveys indicate that Mr. Trump is now all but the most unpopular second-term president at this stage of their tenure in the history of polling going back to the 1940s. The only exception is not one that would give Mr. Trump much solace: Richard M. Nixon had even less public support at this stage in his second term but at that point he was just days away from resigning over the Watergate scandal.
These kinds of poll numbers would throw a normal White House into panic mode, especially coming just three months before a midterm election. Someone might be fired. A speech might be written. A new set of policies might be devised. But Mr. Trump has never been a normal president, and he does not react to political circumstances in the same way his predecessors have. Through force of will and command over his MAGA base, he has traditionally played a weak hand strong.
“He’s always going to project strength regardless what the numbers are and he’ll say they’re fake anyway,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime Republican strategist, adding that he did not expect any switch in political strategy. “Short of him screaming and throwing something at a staffer, that’s it.”
It is, of course, hard to have a course correction if it is not entirely clear what the course was to begin with. The most impulsive president of modern times, Mr. Trump follows his instincts and can completely reverse himself by the day, or sometimes the hour.
It has worked well enough for him that he has dominated American politics for more than a decade. Even though he won a plurality in 2024, Mr. Trump has never won a majority of the popular vote in any of his three elections nor enjoyed support from a majority in Gallup polling at any point of either term. Yet he has governed as if he were a more popular president.
Still, the latest numbers are particularly bleak and have Republicans increasingly rattled as they dread a Democratic wave that could cost them the House and possibly even the Senate in November. Mr. Trump has the support of just 34 percent of Americans in CNN’s latest poll, matching his lowest point just after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He had the approval of just 33 percent in a new AP-NORC survey, tying his lowest since 2017, and 32 percent in Quinnipiac University data, falling to an all-time low in that poll.
By comparison, at this stage of their second terms, Bill Clinton was at 64 percent, Ronald Reagan at 61 percent and Dwight D. Eisenhower at 58 percent, according to historical Gallup surveys. Those underwater included Barack Obama at 43 percent, Harry S. Truman at 39 percent and George W. Bush at 37 percent, all of whom went on to see their party lose seats in midterm elections months later. Nixon, on the verge of resignation as he faced impeachment, was at 24 percent at this point.
The challenge for Mr. Trump and Republicans is that the president is underwater on issues almost across the board, including areas where he historically had been stronger, like the economy and immigration. As for the war in Iran, it was already the only U.S. war in the history of polling that more Americans opposed from the very start — and what support there was has cratered even further, with voters now against it 2 to 1.
Moreover, the worry for Republicans is not just that voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the presidency but strongly disapprove, suggesting that they would be more motivated than Trump loyalists to show up this fall.
“Those people are going to vote,” said Douglas B. Sosnik, who was Mr. Clinton’s White House political director and senior adviser. “And the non-MAGA Republicans are not motivated to turn out.”
Having said that, politics are not the same as they once were. The way that House lines are drawn these days means that there are fewer genuinely competitive districts, suggesting that even a strong Democratic wave may not generate as many new seats as it might have in the past. That was cemented even more so by a wave of mid-decade redistricting in recent months.
“It is true that Trump’s polling is at the bottom of any president in the run-up to a midterm election,” Mr. Sosnik said. But he added, “I think that politics has changed so much that you need to put some context to Trump’s disapproval and how it compares to other presidents and how this will impact the election results.”
“Most importantly,” he said, “the Republicans are far more insulated than in the past due to the structural changes in American politics driven by political polarization and education as the new fault line in American politics. There are simply far fewer competitive states and districts which will limit the size of the blue wave.”
Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, said that political polarization means that “job approval trades in a narrow band these days” compared with the past. “Job approval in the low 40s or even high 30s is not the political catastrophe it would have been two or three decades ago,” she said. “Presidents barely start out at 50 percent to begin with.”
“But,” she added, “low 30s, if accurate, means pieces of the coalition have started to break away. You’re not just cutting loose swing voters at that point.”
Mr. Trump has to count on the opposition squandering its advantage. “The best thing Republicans have going for them is that the Democratic Party is going through its own issues and does not have a crisp message besides ‘Trump is bad,’” she said. “However, if the environment truly stays this grim, that may be enough.”
The White House did not address the president’s polls in response to a request for comment but boasted of his record. “No other president in history has accomplished more for hard-working Americans than President Trump, who is working tirelessly to create jobs, cool inflation, increase housing affordability, and more,” said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman. “The president has already made historic progress not only in America but around the world, and this is just the beginning as his agenda continues taking effect.”
Mr. Trump himself has made clear that he sees a different reality than most independent pollsters and political strategists of both parties — and distrusts results that are not favorable to him.
“Polls are very dishonest, just like a lot of reporters,” he told journalists during a news conference at the Group of 7 summit in France in June. A week later, he made his claim that his approval ratings were “THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN” on his social media site.
Two days later, on June 26, he cited a survey conducted by his own pollsters putting his approval rating at 50 percent. Not satisfied with that, he then gave himself another 15 points. “Other Polls have my Approval Rating at 65%, and more!” he wrote. “Like Journalists, Honest Pollsters are very rare and hard to find!”
A couple weeks later, he seemed to invent another number, albeit even in his own rendering his public support was slipping. “59% Approval Rating,” he wrote on July 12, down six points from his previously asserted rating. “Prices coming down along with the lowering of oil and gas.” In neither case did he cite an actual poll with those numbers. And the price of oil has gone up since then.
Whether he believes such numbers or not, Mr. Trump has made a point of acting as if he were popular even when he is not. And because of his proven ability to punish Republican lawmakers in primaries, he has managed to keep his party in line most of the time.
In Washington, the question is whether that control is beginning to slip amid Republican resistance on Capitol Hill to his plan to give $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to his supporters who claim to have been mistreated by the Biden administration and his nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general.
Political observers have counted Mr. Trump out before only to see him survive the kinds of controversies and poll numbers that would hobble other politicians. He seems unconcerned by the pleadings of Republicans who want him to end the Iran war and focus more on affordability. Instead, he is pursuing legacy projects like a new White House ballroom and a triumphal arch, no matter how much the polls suggest that voters are not as enthusiastic.
“He is YOLO,” said Mr. Heye, using the initials for You Only Live Once. “He’s not sitting there thinking, ‘Gosh, my powers are weakened because of this.’ It’s part of why he was re-elected and why he’s impervious to some scandals.”
