Trump’s poll ratings should worry Republicans

Hello Swampians, it’s Jonathan Derbyshire here, the FT’s US opinion editor, standing in for Ed Luce.

Before he left for a well-deserved break, Ed had been busy. On Sunday, he spoke on the phone, for the second time in the space of a fortnight, to President Donald Trump, who told him that he wanted to “take the oil in Iran”. Ed then followed that scoop with a column in which he argued that Trump’s difficulties weren’t restricted to the war in the Middle East. The president’s poll numbers are tanking, while his trade and immigration agendas, the signature policies of his second term, are encountering judicial resistance, too.

The point was that Trump’s slide in the polls wasn’t just down to the unpopularity of his Iranian adventure. “Months before he embarked on his Gulf war of choice,” Ed wrote, “his poll numbers were heading south”. Indeed, in a Swamp Note back in mid-December, I wrote: “It’s hard not to conclude that Trump, beset by poor (and deteriorating) approval ratings, is, if not a lame duck exactly, then at the very least struggling to muster any momentum on behalf of his party ahead of next year’s midterm elections.”

That analysis may have struck some readers as premature, coming as it did less than a year after Trump’s return to the White House. But the downward trend in the polls that was already discernible then has gathered pace since. And the president seemed to acknowledge voters’ misgivings about his presidency, especially about the state of the economy and the cost of living (problems arguably exacerbated by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the opening of hostilities at the end of February), in his televised address to the nation on Wednesday evening.

The ostensible purpose of what turned out to be a somewhat rambling 19-minute speech was to provide Americans with an update on the “tremendous progress our warriors have made in Iran” and to reassure them that the US is on track to achieve all its military objectives (although these remain ill-defined) “very shortly”. “We are going to finish the job — we are going to finish it very fast,” he said.

But Trump also felt it necessary to acknowledge what he insisted was the “short-term” economic pain caused by the war, evidenced by the high price of gasoline at the pumps, which he blamed on the Iranians’ “deranged” attacks on shipping in the Strait.

You have to suspect that he had at least one eye on opinion polling which this week showed just how precipitously his approval ratings are plummeting — not just on the war, but, more alarmingly for Trump, on the economy.

A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll published on Monday shows his approval rating stands at 33 per cent, the lowest it’s been at any point during his second term. And, worryingly for his party with the midterms in mind, 17 per cent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 now harbour reservations about the choice.

Trump’s tariffs are unpopular, with 28 per cent of Americans approving and 64 per cent disapproving. Economists have warned about their inflationary effects, of course, a message which now seems to be getting through to voters. Only 24 per cent of voters approve of how the administration is handling inflation, compared with 33 per cent a year ago.

These findings were echoed in a poll published by CNN a couple of days later, which found that Trump’s approval rating on the economy had hit a new low of just 31 per cent. Seventy-seven per cent said “economic conditions in the US are poor”, with the president’s economic approval among Republicans down 14 points.

Sixty-three per cent of those polled said “higher costs at the pump have caused at least some financial hardship in their household”. One consequence of these economic conditions — and a perturbing one for Republicans who can see Trump’s electoral coalition unravelling in real time — is that his net approval rating among adults in households earning under $50,000 stood at minus 22 points.

Trump’s appeal to working-class voters was key to both his election victories, of course. GOP operatives will no doubt have winced when, at a White House Easter lunch on Wednesday, he said baldly: “We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.”

My respondent when I wrote about Trump’s polling problems before Christmas was the FT’s Washington bureau chief James Politi. My question to him then was: “Is Trump already a lame duck? And what can he, and the Republicans do, over the next 11 months to improve their chances in the midterms?” I’m going to call on James again and might as well ask the same question, since this polling must be causing foreboding in the White House and in the wider Republican Party. James, what can they do to turn this around before November?

Recommended reading

• This conversation between Michael Wakin, of the Oxford Political Review, and the political theorist Laura Field about the “rightwing intellectuals who keep winning” is well worth reading. I haven’t yet read Field’s book Furious Minds, though I’ve been meaning to. The account she offers here of what she calls the “Maga New Right” suggests to me that I should remedy that oversight in short order.

• I enjoyed David Pogue’s essay for New York magazine on “The Mystery of Steve Jobs”, published as Apple, the company Jobs co-founded, turns 50. Pogue suggests that the standard account of Jobs as, in the memorable words of one former Apple employee, a “mission-driven asshole” is only half-right. Jobs, he writes, contained multitudes. “You’d have to have known him for years to see the whole man, and even then you might get a picture that felt fractured or incomplete.”

• Something to listen to, rather than read: a new, six-part series from the FT News Briefing podcast explores the irreversible impact of Trump’s tariffs and how the global economy has changed.

• Finally, I had the pleasure of writing this weekend’s Lunch with the FT — with the novelist Jay McInerney. We talked about New York in the eighties, his 10,000-bottle wine cellar and how, after the publication of Bright Lights, Big City, he “went from being a nobody to being somebody”.

James Politi replies

Hi Jonathan, compared to my response in December, there is little doubt that Trump’s political standing — and that of every Republican on the ballot in November is decisively worse.

The Iran war is unpopular because it flouts Trump’s own vow not to launch new wars, but also because the rise in petrol prices it triggered will be evidence to voters that the president doesn’t care as much about the economy as he pitched during the 2024 campaign.

Trump’s decision to deliver a primetime address on Wednesday on the war showed that the White House is worried. But it appears that he fumbled it by failing to signal convincingly that the war was actually about to wind down.

There are other signs that Trump senses the political winds are moving strongly against him. He had resisted firing top officials during the first year of his second term. But that has changed, a sign of his growing impatience. Last month he ousted Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and on Thursday he sacked Pam Bondi, the attorney-general. No one on his national security, energy and economic teams has so far paid any price for the problematic Iran war, but it may only be a matter of time.