Trump poll numbers this week showed Donald Trump stuck in the low 30s, with Quinnipiac putting his approval at 32 percent. and -NORC had him at 34 percent and 33 percent, leaving three independent polls with the same basic picture.
The poll went further: 73 percent of respondents said Trump “hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.” That finding gives shape to the approval figures, because it points to a complaint about focus as well as overall approval.
Tatishe Nteta on 40 percent
Tatishe Nteta, the provost of political science at UMass-Amherst, said in April that polls slipping under the 40 percent mark are “dangerously outside of the norm for a sitting president.” He said there is usually about a 40-40 split in hardcore approval-disapproval for a sitting president. Trump’s numbers sit well below that line across the three polls released this week.
The Argument, which surveyed 3,000 registered voters between July 20 and July 26, found Trump at 39 percent approval, with 47 percent strongly disapproving and another 10 percent somewhat disapproving. Navigator Research released a poll this week that tied Trump’s decline in popularity to gas prices and the costly war in Iran, adding another piece to the same broad pattern.
and -NORC
also found 58 percent of respondents were dissatisfied or angry about Trump’s D.C. renovation projects. -NORC’s 33 percent result and Quinnipiac’s 32 percent result fit a run of bad numbers for Trump since he retook office and started his tariff regime.
For Democrats heading into the upcoming midterms, the practical takeaway is straightforward: the polling gives them a fresh opening to argue that Trump is not meeting public expectations on attention and priorities. The unanswered part is whether the weakness comes more from tariffs or from the war in Iran, and those polls do not separate the two neatly.
Trump’s approval was described as his worst rapport with the American public since the end of his first term and the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol building, a level of support that leaves little room for a reset unless the numbers move soon.
