Early voting was underway for the Donald Trump administration midterm elections, and the numbers were moving against President Trump. An -NORC Center Public Affairs Research poll published on Oct. 1 found that 71 percent of adult Americans disapprove of how he is handling the war.
Another 65 percent in that poll said Trump's policies had caused high prices and helped create an affordability crisis. average of polls also showed less than 40 percent of voters approved of his overall performance in office.
Daniel Dale and Trump
That gap sits on top of a long record of falsehoods. reporter and fact-checker Daniel Dale said that by September 2020 he had recorded more than 8,500 false claims by Trump since September 2016, and The Washington Post's fact-checking team later found 30,573 false and misleading statements during his first term.
Before the 2020 presidential election, The Washington Post said Trump reached 503 false and misleading statements in a single day. He still falsely claims that he won the 2020 presidential election, even after building his 2024 election campaign around promises to cut the cost of a new home in half, reduce gasoline prices to less than $2 per gallon, bring interest rates way down, end Russia's war against Ukraine in 24 hours, and bring the cost of everything way down.
Trump's price fight
On Oct. 1, Trump said, "Everyone thinks the prices are high because of me, but they're not." He added, "We have the greatest [economic] numbers of any president in the history of our country," and, "The only thing we're doing badly at is public relations."
He told a Time Magazine journalist, "They're fake numbers. … The pollsters are corrupt." That response clashes with an Economist-YouGov poll in September that found only 21 percent of Americans believed he would keep his promise to send every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans kept control.
Midterms and voters
The political stakes now run through early voting, not speeches. Americans are being asked to weigh Trump's handling of war, prices, and his broader record at the ballot box while the polling gap keeps widening around him.
Whether that voting data matches the polling shift is the test that matters next. For now, the numbers already show how much harder it has become for Trump to sell the same promises that powered two election wins.
