The latest poll from The Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked its usual slate of questions about voters' views of President Trump's job performance.
In so doing, it also offers some insights into how the looming government shutdown and ObamaCare fight are going to play out.
First, let's get a baseline.
The president's overall rating from the voters in the AP/NORC poll is pretty grim at 36 percent, the kind of number he hasn't seen since the low points of his first term. Those came during his effort to retain power after losing the 2020 election and, his previous all-time low in December 2017, when his chaotic first year in office came to a close amid a government shutdown of his own making.
His current score in an average of high-quality polls is running 21.8 points underwater: 37.8 percent average approval and 59.6 percent average disapproval. The comparable period eight years ago saw Trump 18.4 points below sea level: 38.2 percent approval and 56.6 percent disapproval.
Context is key here. The president started his first term as an unpopular upstart succeeding a predecessor who left office with mediocre but stable approval ratings. On many occasions, Trump lived down to the worst expectations of voters, so his trip to the pits of December 2017 was a shorter one. This time around, Trump started with his best numbers of either term; his sole trip into positive territory so far. The president has fallen more than 25 points since January, while his 2017 journey to the bottom required only 13.6 points.
Four years of former President Biden fatigue and a recollection of the best period of Trump's previous term — 2018 and 2019 — had raised expectations for a return to that middle era when his tax cuts juiced the economy and he was in many ways held in check by Congress. What voters got was a wilder, darker version of the 2017 disruptor with next to zero pushback from a Republican-controlled Congress.
Creative tension with old-school Republicans in the first term and then genuine fears about his own reelection following the trouncing the GOP got in 2018 produced a far more popular version of Trumpism than the current undiluted dose. Trump has been riding roughshod over Washington and voters are recoiling.
Looked at from Trump's perspective in one way: So what?
He's beyond the reach of voters, making money hand over fist on side deals, and he remains such a potent threat in most Republican primaries that few in his party are willing to resist him. Yes, if Democrats capture the House, he will almost surely be impeached a third time and at the very least spend the final two years of his term in gridlock and constant conflict. But the more that looks like a foregone conclusion, the more he can let himself enjoy the freedom that comes with lame duck status: keep working on his family fortune, legacy projects like building his Taj Mahal of a presidential library and dictating the terms of the 2028 Republican nominating contest.
Yes, Trump might like to be a popular president instead of skulking around in his current second-term Nixon mode, but MAGA's core supporters will never abandon him. As long as he is still the Kingfish in much of Deep South, Appalachia, the Plains and the Midwest, two years of sticking it to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer (or his successor), doing softball interviews and dedicating buildings to himself might be OK.
But when have you ever known Trump to accept defeat?
If an economic recovery helped pull his numbers up after an almost equally dire first year of his first term, why not the second? The tax cuts passed this year will kick in soon, and while they're not as consequential as the originals, there will be some real boosts. And if Trump can deliver a deal to end the trade war that China currently seems to be winning — or if the Supreme Court throws out the lot of the April "Liberation Day" import taxes — it would be a windfall for almost all Americans.
And while his decision to hit the campaign trail with regularity in 2026 is of dubious political value, it certainly suggests the president is not ready yet to yield to the blue wave.
So, back to the poll.
The only subset of job approval in which Trump isn't underwater is border security, where he cards a 50 percent approval/48 percent disapproval. Everything else is in the tank, ranging from crime (43 percent/55 percent) all the way down to health care (29 percent/69 percent). Significantly, Trump does not have a positive approval rating on any issue with independent voters, including a gut-wrenching 15 percent approval on his handling of the economy.
This, more than anything, is why Democrats are having such a good run at the ballot box in 2025. They have the same or better intensity levels among their own voters that they did in their big 2018 midterm win, but right now, the independent majority makers are very down on the president and the party he represents. If Trump's 2024 victory is best understood as a response to inflation and stagnation, there could be no greater sin for a "win so much that you'll get tired of winning" kind of president to not deliver on promised improvements.
But if independents are most miffed about the state of the economy, why is health care Trump's worst issue? Because of Republicans themselves.
Democrats disapprove of everything the president does. Even on border security, 80 percent of Democrats still give him a thumbs down. Most of the rest are more than 10 points higher. And in previous polls, you could say the same thing about Republicans in reverse. But this time, some cracks are showing.
Trump has more than 80 percent Republican approval on the border and crime, but then the slide starts, including a 69 percent approval rating on the economy. But there below that sits health care, where Trump is doing just 59 percent with Republicans. By Trump standards, that's flunking out.
We might normally say that at least some of those folks are conservatives who think that Trump is doing too much on health care, but since the most controversial provision of his only major piece of legislation was a substantial cut to Medicaid, that seems unlikely.
The only reasonable conclusion is that Republicans want Trump to be doing more to deal with health care, and the most problematic part of health care in the U.S. is definitely costs.
Here, I'd highly recommend Yuval Levin's excellent piece on the GOP's struggle to offer workable conservative alternatives on health insurance. But also instructive is Noah Rothman's work on the question of the new Republican coalition, which, as it turns out, isn't very conservative.
If you get a bunch of blue-collar former Democrats to join the Republican coalition because of a combination of economic and cultural issues, you have not made Friedrich Hayek devotees of them. The premise of big government nationalism is that the government will take care of its people, and letting insurance premiums double on government subsidized health insurance is probably not part of that vision.
America First and Austrian economics are not natural stablemates, which is something that Vice President Vance and the other nationalists keep reminding old-fashioned Republicans. That's true enough, but that revelation carries some substantial political implications that the GOP is only beginning to reckon with. Vance can praise Zohran Mamdani all he wants, but cutting Medicaid and letting ObamaCare fall off a cliff is not the way to keep the voters he wants on board with the new post-liberal GOP.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is out in front on this one, flaying his fellow Republicans for not keeping premium supports in place. But so far, most die-hard Republicans want little to do with spending billions of dollars to keep ObamaCare propped up. It's a program many of them have been trying to kill since before it was born.
That's how you end up with the president losing altitude with his own party for failing to boost ObamaCare compared with his first term when the most notable intersection with the issue was GOP outrage at failing to repeal his predecessor's signature law.
If Trump concludes that he has to support an extension of ObamaCare to keep his party at least in the game for 2026, is he ready to be the guy who admitted defeat on one of his greatest frustrations from the first term? He's got just a few weeks to decide which is more unpalatable: accepting ObamaCare or kissing off the midterms.
Maybe they can just Gulf of America this sucker and rename it. So long ObamaCare, hello Trump Health Gold Edition.
[Programming alert: Watch "The Hill Sunday" with Chris Stirewalt — As Americans face sky-high health care premiums and a struggling economy, Congress remains deadlocked on solutions with yet another government shutdown on the horizon. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who is spearheading the effort for a GOP alternative on ObamaCare joins us. And Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.) on the Democratic response, the direction of his party for 2026 and the primary calendar in 2028. And, as always, we'll have expert analysis from our best-in-the-business panel of journalists, including the great George Will. Be sure to catch us on NewsNation or your local CW station at 10 a.m. ET / 9 a.m. CT.]
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