Donald Trump's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Polling Days

And why it's likely to get worse from here.

Photo by Jose M on Unsplash

One of my 2025 life hacks is not paying too much attention to internecine debates about how to oppose Donald Trump. Oppose him on principle about everything or oppose him with a measured, focused rage on issues where he is the most politically vulnerable? I get the arguments that both sides make on this, and I find myself toggling between both perspectives. Mostly, however, I recognize that this is not my bailiwick. So I pick and choose where my own opposition to Trump and his ilk makes the most sense and go from there.

This past month’s polling, however, set up an interesting short-term debate on this question with some long-term implications for Trump and the United States.

The Trump administration’s illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador — and the government’s acknowledgment that this was due to “administrative error” — caused a split among opposition politicians and pundits about how to respond. The initial response among those paying attention was outrage over the Trump administration’s cruelty and disregard for the rule of law.

California governor and amateur podcaster Gavin Newsom initially dismissed the Abrego Garcia case as a “distraction,” however — and some other Democrats felt likewise. Pundits like Matthew Yglesias and Nate Silver similarly argued that voters by and large supported Trump’s approach to immigration, thereby making the Abrego Garcia case a losing one. As Silver wrote, “even if Abrego Garcia’s case is really about democracy — due process, and the separation of powers rather than about immigration per se — I’m not sure that’s a winning issue for the anti-Trump coalition…. in Abrego Garcia’s case, I’m not sure that voters actually will become more sympathetic to Democrats if they spend more time studying it.” Both Yglesias and Silver observed that the secular decline in Trump’s polling seemed to stall out the week Democrats focused on Abrego Garcia.

Other Democrats like Senator Chris Van Hollen rejected this argument:

The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie also pushed back against the Silver/Yglesias logic earlier in the week:

The goal of Van Hollen’s journey to El Salvador — during which he was stopped by Salvadoran soldiers and turned away from the prison — was to bring attention to Abrego Garcia and invite greater scrutiny of the administration’s removal program and its disregard for due process. It was a success. And that success has inspired other Democrats to make the same trip, in hopes of turning more attention to the administration’s removal program and putting more pressure on the White House to obey the law….

All of this negative attention has had an effect. It’s not just that the president’s overall approval rating has dipped into the low 40s — although it has — but that he’s losing his strong advantage on immigration as well. Fifty percent of Americans said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, and a new Reuters poll showed Trump slightly underwater on the issue, with a 45 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval….

As much as Trump has tried to project himself as an unstoppable force, the truth is that he is as vulnerable as he’s ever been. All it took was real political leadership to demonstrate the extent to which the Trump White House was more of a paper tiger than it might have looked at first glance.

It helped that the White House overplayed its hand again and again. When institutions like Columbia University effectively surrendered to the administration, they did not buy themselves grace so much as they were forced into Trump’s service as agents of his will. There would be no bargaining. There was no deal you could cut to save your Cloud City. You could either submit or resist….

Trump wants us to be demoralized. He wants his despotic plans to be a fait accompli. They will be if no one stands in the way. But every time we — and especially those with power and authority — make ourselves into obstacles, we also make it a little less likely that the administration’s authoritarian fantasy becomes our reality.

Bouie referenced some of the recent polling in his column, and over the last 72 hours more data has come in. And I think it’s safe to say that the raft of recent polling has tipped the scales towards Bouie’s framing of the problem.

Whether one looks at polling from Fox News or YouGov or WaPo/Ipsos or AP/NORC the results are the same:

1. Trump’s overall approval rating has started to slide again. The AP poll has him down to 39 percent approval overall.

2. Trump is now under water on immigration as an issue across multiple polls. As G. Elliott Morris noted, “Since April 16, according to YouGov’s data, Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has fallen by 10 points. That matches up neatly with the timeline of Trump refusing to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to America.” There’s additional data to back up the role of the Abrego Garcia case: The New York Times/Siena poll finds 52 percent of the public disapproving of his handing of the Abrego Garcia case in particular with only 31 percent supporting him.

In other words, highlighting the Abrego Garcia case did not help Trump at all. It just softened up the support he had on immigration.

This is all bad for Trump, as the New York Times’ Nate Cohn explains:

On question after question, voters say he’s going too far. Sixty-six percent of them say “chaotic” describes Mr. Trump’s second term well; 59 percent say “scary” fits at least somewhat well….

For most presidents, the first 100 days are as good as it gets. It’s hard to remember now, but at this time four years ago Joe Biden was still being compared to F.D.R. Even the doomed presidents — think Jimmy Carter’s first term or George W. Bush’s second — still had positive approval ratings at this stage.

It’s not easy to burn this much good will so fast, and it doesn’t usually get any easier from here….

Mr. Trump’s first 100 days would count as a political disappointment — at best.

While he won only narrowly, the election was still a decisive victory for populist conservative politics over an exhausted liberalism. There were countless opportunities for him to push major initiatives with significant public support, on issues like immigration, crime, energy, “woke” or the economy. Back in January, it seemed possible for Mr. Trump to solidify a coalition behind these issues.

Not anymore. Not only has he forfeited whatever political opportunity existed at the beginning of his term, but he has also managed to turn his usual strengths into liabilities. Voters no longer say his policies will help them personally anymore, one of the central reasons for his victory just six months ago.

One could argue that this point that while Trump is unpopular, he’s still got his base, and therefore a high floor of support. In other words, it’s Trump 1.0 all over again.

Here’s the thing, though: I strongly suspect that Trump’s numbers have not bottomed out yet.