Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Hits New All-Time Low in Nate Silver Tracker - Newsweek

President Donald Trump’s net approval fell to minus 22.4 in Nate Silver’s tracker on Thursday, its lowest point across either of his White House terms.

It comes as VoteHub’s polling average also shows Trump’s net approval at a record-low minus 22.4 points, worse than any president at this stage since polling began in 1945, according to VoteHub head of data science, Zachary Donnini.

An unpopular president can make the national environment harder for candidates from the governing party, making this latest record low significant just weeks out from the November 3 midterm elections.

"Trump now has the lowest net approval of any president at this point or earlier in their presidency since polling began in 1945," Donnini said in a post on social media platform X.

"It's now more than 10 points worse than both his own first term and Biden's at the same point."

White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Newsweek previously that the 2024 election was the "ultimate poll," arguing that nearly 80 million Americans backed Trump’s agenda.

Ingle added that the president had made "historic progress" on jobs, inflation and housing affordability, with further effects still to come.

Newsweek has contacted the White House press office for comment on the Nate Silver tracker and is awaiting a response.

Republican candidates in competitive races could be most vulnerable if swing voters turn against the party or if less enthusiastic Trump supporters prove less motivated to vote.

Trump’s current deficit in Nate Silver’s closely watched tracker poll is nearly twice the minus 11.6 recorded at the equivalent stage of his first term in 2018 and is also worse than Joe Biden’s minus 9.6 at the same point in his presidency.

The result does not predict an election outcome, but it shows that opposition is both broader and more firmly held than support.

Silver said Trump’s latest net rating was below every point in his first term, including the period after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

At day 612 of the current presidency, the tracker put him at minus 22.4, against minus 11.6 on the comparable day in 2018.

"Trump approval now at -22.4, his low point for the term and now lower than at any point in his first term, even after Jan. 6," Silver wrote on X.

"By comparison, he was at a ‘mere’ -11.6 at this point in 2018."

Net approval is calculated by subtracting the share who disapprove from the share who approve.

With Trump at 37.6 percent approval, the average implies that disapproval is close to 60 percent.

The historical comparison is politically striking, but it should not be read as a forecast.

Midterm results are decided district by district and state by state, where candidate quality, turnout, partisanship and local issues can outweigh national opinion.

Still, presidential approval offers a measure of the climate in which those contests take place.

A large negative rating can force candidates from the president’s party to choose between maintaining support from loyal voters and creating distance among people dissatisfied with the administration.

Silver’s deeper finding concerns the strength of opinion on each side.

Sharing an image of a chart he branded "underrated," he wrote on X: "If you throw out voters who *weakly* approve or disapprove of Trump's performance and only look at *strong* approval/disapproval, his net approval rating is -29, even worse than his overall -22."

When people who only somewhat approve or disapprove are separated from those holding strong views, Trump’s weak net approval remains positive at plus 7. His strong net approval, however, is minus 29.4.

That imbalance suggests the headline rating receives meaningful support from people whose backing is not deeply committed, while opposition is concentrated among voters holding a firmer judgment.

Silver described lukewarm approval as easier to move toward disapproval than entrenched opposition is to convert into support.

For Republicans, that creates two distinct risks: softer supporters could change their view, while strongly dissatisfied voters may remain highly motivated.

Short-term events have produced upward movements in Trump’s numbers, but none has reversed the longer decline. Silver said that dynamic differs from Trump’s first term, when attitudes were more stable.

VoteHub’s September 23 average independently pointed to the same net rating.

Because aggregators can draw on some of the same underlying polls, the agreement is not wholly independent confirmation, but it shows the finding is not unique to Silver Bulletin’s model.

Silver Bulletin seeks to include professionally conducted surveys while excluding polls suspected of using fabricated data, amateur online questionnaires and results altered through techniques such as multilevel regression and poststratification.

Polls receive influence according to the pollster’s historical rating, sample size and fieldwork recency.

The model also limits the ability of frequent pollsters to dominate the average and adjusts for persistent differences between individual firms.

Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.