President Donald Trump’s approval numbers have been in a prolonged slump in a way that we haven’t seen in his second term. According to The New York Times’ national polling average on Monday, 38% of Americans approve and 58% disapprove of his performance. He hasn’t broken a 40% average approval since late April. The overall figures are bad, clearly, and though Trump has had runs of horrific polling before and bounced back, there are reasons to believe he’ll have a harder time recovering this time.
Trump’s cratering poll numbers are remarkable in part because they challenge a consensus about how low any politician’s numbers can rise or fall in this political climate.
Trump has been able to shrug off bad polling in the past because the supposed floor his MAGA base represents keeps him from dipping below a certain point. But approval numbers this far underwater suggest Trump’s floor is collapsing. The Washington Post noted last week that a growing number of white voters without college degrees disapprove of Trump’s performance. Meanwhile, young and nonwhite voters who swung right in the 2024 election have jumped back to the left. And independents’ support has only crawled downward compared to when Trump’s term began.
GOP voters shifting away from Trump is bad enough for Republicans hoping to win in November. But the collapse of the coalition that sent Trump to office makes things all the worse.
Trump’s cratering poll numbers are remarkable in part because they challenge a consensus about how low any politician’s numbers can rise or fall in this political climate. As Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, told the Los Angeles Times for its Sunday story about Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, “Polarization has raised the floor and lowered the ceiling for approval ratings.”
“Dramatic swings are less common because approval ratings are now fixed to partisanship,” Rottinghaus said. “Approval ratings today are increasingly a measure of who the president is rather than what the president does.”
Play
Similarly, the answer to another classic polling question — “Is the country moving in the right direction or wrong direction?” — has become linked to whether one supports the person in the Oval Office. It is not a reliable barometer for the mood of the country.
Hayes Brown
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.
© 2026 Versant Media, LLC
