At What Point Is It Just the Floor?

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Donald Trump is having a bad few months. Like, a really bad few months. Battered by a slew of polls that show him at the lowest popularity level of his public career, Trump and his feckless team have lapsed into full-on panic mode. Trump’s latest approval rating of just 34% puts him on par with former President Jimmy Carter as one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history. That’s not a place anyone wants to be.

Worse still, Trump’s collapsing popularity seems to be coming from inside the MAGA house. Only 68% of Republican voters approve of his job performance according to a new Associated Press poll, down from nearly 90% in the early days of his second term. For a president who once commanded lockstep loyalty from the GOP, Trump’s erosion is now an existential risk for Republican lawmakers seeking re-election this November.

This week we’re diving into the polls to see where Trump is bleeding support and what it means for this year’s midterm elections. What emerges is an image of a MAGA iceberg rapidly melting into a sea of voter discontent — and a president incapable of understanding the many reasons why.

— Max Burns

Let’s start with young voters. The kids confounded expectations (and hurt many liberal hearts) in 2024 when they abandoned the Democratic Party en masse to support the MAGA agenda. Trump won young men aged 18-29 by 2 points, part of a broader 10-point swing among young people in general towards Republicans last cycle. Concerningly for Democrats, Trump also improved his performance with young women between 2020 and 2024 by 7 points — though young women still favored Kamala Harris 58-40. Trump even tied Harris among white women aged 18-29, who split their vote 49-49.

Those results sent Democratic leaders into a tailspin and led to calls for the party to abandon social issues like climate change and LGBTQ+ advocacy in order to chase Trump to the right. 18 months later, faced with skyrocketing living costs, a ‘student debt cliff’, and an economy producing net zero jobs, it now looks like the great youth migration to MAGA wasn’t the generational shift Republicans hoped for.

Republicans are now about as popular to young voters as a flaming oil spill. The Spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll charts young voters’ long road back to Democrats in stunning form: voters aged 18-22 now back Democrats by 23 points, while the party improved its standing with voters aged 23-29 to an impressive +30 (up from just +6 in 2024). Trump’s losses are especially concentrated among the young men who supported him in 2024. New data from Third Way reveals that the same young men who backed Trump by 2 points before now support Democrats by a staggering 16 point margin, one of the biggest gaps ever recorded.

Those numbers are driven by a job market so bad that college graduates can’t even find unpaid internships, let alone jobs that allow them to begin paying their loans. But there’s also the pervasive sense that despite his promises, most of Trump’s presidency so far seems to have been dedicated to making the economy as bad as possible. That’s a feeling shared by voters across all age groups and political parties — including the independent voters who will decide control of Congress later this year.

Data analysis conducted by CNN’s Harry Enten reveals Trump is bleeding support among independent voters to the point that he’s carried a net negative approval rating every day for more than a year. With an overall approval rating of -38 among independents across multiple polls, Trump is now more unpopular than any other president in modern history, including Richard Nixon. 

A new Quinnipiac University poll confirms the trend, with Trump earning the support of only 25 percent of independent voters compared to 68 percent who disapprove of his presidency, for a net disapproval rating of -43. Voters now use words like ‘betrayed’ and ‘disappointed’ to describe Trump’s presidency. Those spurned independents are now charting a course to toss Republicans out of power in 2026.

Trump’s base isn’t much happier. Only a bare majority of Republicans (52%) say they approve of Trump’s job performance, while a majority say they distrust his handling of the economy. Meanwhile, the president’s most die-hard supporters are beginning to give up on their man. The number of Republicans who said they felt ‘strong’ support for Trump declined from 29% in January 2025 to just 17% in the latest polling. That collapse sent alarm bells ringing across MAGAland.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, long a Trump booster, remarked this week that if the midterms were held in May, Republicans “would lose” because they don’t “get reality.” Gingrich cited everything from the war in Iran to housing affordability to rising gasoline prices as causes for Republicans’ woes. He forgot to mention the most important part: Trump himself, whose policies led the GOP into their current polling and approval pit.

Being Donald Trump means never having to say you’re sorry. That’s great for the ego, but brutal when a majority of Americans think you’ve done a whole lot worth apologizing for. Trump remains convinced (at least in public) that his policies have put America on the path to prosperity and respect, a fact he proclaims at nearly every press gaggle.

Few Americans agree with him. To them, Trump’s overwhelming confidence looks more like a mixture of delusion and willful blindness. Republicans shed a few more voters every time Trump stands in front of media cameras and defiantly declares that things have never been better for the millions of people who now struggle financially because of his policies. That’s a recipe for electoral disaster. 

If Trump can’t humble his own pride and fix the serious problems he’s created, voters are ready to do the humbling for him.

This May, we’re launching a new series that refuses to accept current dysfunction as America’s destiny. Repairing America will examine the policies, power structures, and political choices that created today’s crises, and spotlight real, achievable solutions that could make life better for everyone.

At a moment when daily life feels unaffordable, civil rights feel precarious, trust in public institutions is collapsing, and inequality is widening across nearly every corner of American life, this series asks the urgent question beneath it all: How did we get here, and what can actually be done about it? Over the next six months, we’ll covering more than 25 of the most-pressing issues Americans collectively face. This series is grounded in clear-eyed reporting and driven by the belief that change is possible, necessary, and exactly what our democracy needs.

We think this is the kind of journalism that this moment demands—and we hope you’ll support it by becoming a member or making a one-time gift in any amount.