When Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, a Gallup poll showed the Republican president with an approval rating of just 24%. More than a half-century later, Donald Trump’s support isn’t quite that low — but he’s getting there.
The Pew Research Center released the results of its latest national survey Thursday, and there is no good news for the incumbent Republican president in the data. From Pew’s report:
Three-in-ten Americans now approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, while 68% disapprove.
Trump’s approval rating has dropped substantially over the course of his second term – his current rating is comparable to the lowest rating of his first term (29% according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the days between Jan. 6, 2021, and the end of his first term).
The problem for Trump isn’t that his support among Democratic and independent voters continues to slide, since he’s already effectively bottomed out among those constituencies.
Rather, what makes the Pew data especially intriguing is that the president’s backing is down because of the same voters who put him back in the White House in the first place.
Nearly a month ago, Trump published an odd boast to his social media platform. “TRUMP Approval Rating in the Republican Party is now 95%, A RECORD,” the president wrote, referring to himself in the third person. “Second place is Ronald Reagan at 86%. Thank you!”
He didn’t say whom, exactly, he was thanking, which was just as well since Trump was referring to polling data that did not appear to exist outside of his own overactive imagination.
That said, there was a highly relevant detail: His support among Republican voters used to be 95%. In fact, the Pew Research Center found that 95% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 approved of his job performance — in early 2025, shortly after his second inaugural.
A year later, however, that number was down to 83%. In July, it was down to 75%.
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Now, it’s down to 67%.
Some might see this and marvel that two-thirds of these Republicans still support the president. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: When Trump’s second term began, roughly 1 in 20 voters who supported his candidacy disapproved of his job performance. Now, it’s 1 in 3.
Let’s also not forget the broader electoral context: Trump and his party decided months ago to nationalize the midterms, to make the president the centerpiece of the GOP’s midterm strategy and to generate excitement among Trump supporters in the Republican base. That was ostensibly the whole point of the party’s recent hapless midterm convention.
Except it didn’t work. With four weeks before Election Day 2026, GOP voters aren’t merely unenthusiastic about their party, they’re increasingly disaffected with their party’s president. It’s exactly the opposite of what Republican strategists hoped — and by some measures, expected — to see at this point in the midterm cycle.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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