Trump enters perilous voting territory, raising questions about base support

WASHINGTON — Mired in a lingering cost-of-living crisis and an unpopular war with Iran, President Trump took a perilous step last week, recording a 34 percent approval rating in a top poll — a record low less than halfway through his second term.

The results constitute one of the sharpest electoral collapses of any modern president. The data, provided by The Economist and YouGov, puts Trump back at his political nadir, which is a number he hasn’t seen since the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack five years ago.

It follows several other surveys released in recent days showing the president entering precarious political territory about six months before the midterm elections, raising alarms in Republican campaign offices across the country about the party’s prospects in the fall.

It has also led pollsters to question long-held assumptions about the floor of support for the president, wondering whether he is at risk of giving way.

“It’s harder to go lower, but it’s possible depending on what he does,” said Christopher Wlezien, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “To reduce that number, you’re going to have to eat away at his heart.”

Trump’s base of support remains strong, reinforcing a long-standing theory among pollsters that partisanship now serves as a direct indicator of presidential approval. But weakening Republican support on specific policy issues — including voters’ top priorities, such as the economy — has begun to raise questions among experts about whether further erosion is possible.

A New York Times poll found his approval at 38 percent, and a Politico poll recorded a similar erosion, led by a majority of Americans — including 18 percent of Trump supporters — saying they were in worse financial shape than before he took office.

About two in three Americans oppose Trump’s war with Iran. And the coalition that brought him back to power – including renewed support from Latino, independent and young voters – has effectively disappeared.

While the downward trend sounds like the story of a presidency in perpetual trouble, political scientists see a more complex situation.

“Polarization has raised the floor and lowered the ceiling for approval ratings,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Dramatic changes are less common because approval ratings are now fixed on partisanship. »

The comparison with George W. Bush, whose numbers soared after the September 11, 2001, attacks and collapsed in the mid-1920s after Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, is instructive about how polarization has changed in the Trump era.

Bush governed in a country capable of acting together, for or against a president, in response to major events. Americans are no longer influenced in this way when it comes to their opinion of the president, Rottinghaus says.

“Today, approval ratings increasingly measure who the president is rather than what he does,” he said.

Trump, in his own way, seemed to acquiesce to this dynamic. When challenged on his position with the public, or when a Republican lawmaker breaks with him on a policy issue, he has argued that he and the MAGA movement are inseparable. In other words, this opposition to any decision he makes is opposition to the movement itself.

“MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do,” Trump said in a January interview with NBC News when asked if his base supports long-term military interventions abroad.

Rottinghaus likened questions about presidential endorsement to “the same thing as asking if you’re a Republican or not.”

“Then why ask,” he said.

Gallup, the organization that has tracked presidential approval for eight decades, announced earlier this year that it would stop publishing the approval ratings of individual political figures, a change that underscores the evolution of the traditional measure of a politician’s popularity.

Asked about the change, a Gallup spokesperson told the Washington Post at the time that “the context around these measures has changed.”

“They are now widely produced, aggregated and interpreted, and no longer represent an area where Gallup can make its most distinctive contribution,” the spokesperson added.

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