Whole Hog Politics

Whole Hog Politics: Trump is in the dumps, but Dems still sweating

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by Chris Stirewalt - 05/01/26 8:00 AM ET

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by Chris Stirewalt - 05/01/26 8:00 AM ET

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[Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 a.m. ET at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week’s political news and answer questions from a live online audience.]

President Trump has never been this unpopular. And it’s not even close.

His two lowest points from his first term took his average job approval below 40 percent for a net score of -17.8 points after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and his previous all-time low of -18.4 points in the chaotic autumn of 2017.

The president is now consistently under 40 percent approval, with sky-high disapproval. His net score this week is -25.4 points. For context, that’s substantially worse than former President Biden at his low point of -19.8 in the weeks after his disastrous presidential debate with Trump when Biden’s own party was forcing him out of the race.

To find lower numbers than Trump’s, you’d have to go all the way back to the fall of 2008 when former President George W. Bush was getting blamed by most voters for the financial panic and by Republicans for the bailouts aimed at ending it. Which is all to say that the old premise about Trump having “a low ceiling but a high floor” doesn’t hold anymore.

We don’t really need to ask why. Inflation is up, gas prices are way up, and Americans are extremely concerned about the cost of healthcare. The Iran war is stalemated. Immigration enforcement remains a black eye for the administration. Washington fairly oozes with insider dealing as the regular business of government can barely get done. Cabinet members keep getting bounced amid scandals. The president, meanwhile, is obsessed with vanity projects, particularly settling scores against old foes and, always, his ballroom — which Republicans are now asking taxpayers to fund.

If it wasn’t for the 79 percent of Republicans still sticking with him, Trump would be looking at the 20s for sure. Fewer than a quarter of independent voters now approve of the way the president is handling the job. You’d say this is the bottom, but that supposes that, like 2017, Trump is willing to reverse course.

A new report in The Atlantic suggests that Trump has moved beyond the mundane concerns of political popularity and has entered the Hegelian plane of history. “He is unburdened by political concerns,” one administration official said, “and is able to do what is truly right rather than what is in his best political interests.”

Hooooo boy.

If you’re a Republican fighting for her or his life to hang on in this midterm year, the last thing you want to hear about is an “unburdened” Donald Trump. You want that man burdened like a mule, agonizing over how a skeptical voting public will react to every choice. If the president has already reached the “history will be my judge” phase of things, what hope is there of getting him to calm down and help Republicans start minimizing losses? Given the iron correlation between presidential job approval and losses for the party in power, things are getting daggone desperate.

Republicans may be able to gerrymander their way into, say, seven more House seats. But in the time since that effort began with the Texas Legislature last summer, Trump has dropped more than 15 points in his net approval rating. That’s not principally why he dropped, but one has to imagine that Trump’s decline has wiped out a lot more seats than Republicans have drawn themselves into over the same period.

And yet, Democrats are nervous.

If Trump is about as popular as fur-lined Speedos, why are Democrats only up a little less than 6 points in an average of recent generic ballot polls? Why do the same polls that show Trump 20 points underwater show Democrats with just a 3-point advantage on which party voters prefer to control Congress after this fall’s elections?

Republicans and anxious Democrats will quickly point out that as unpopular as Trump and his party have become, the Democratic Party is even worse off, with a favorability rating below 30 percent.

Progressive Democrats will tell you that this is because the party is not progressive enough. Moderate Democrats will tell you that this is because the party is not moderate enough. They are both, in different ways, probably right. But that’s all just mostly retrofitting ideological arguments for whatever political predicament or opportunity happens to be at hand.

But those complaints do speak to the actual problem: Democrats themselves are unhappy with their own party. That same CNN poll that showed Democrats sucking wind on favorability showed that voters who disliked both parties wer