Donald Trump’s approval on the economy has fallen to 33%, a new low in the PBS News/NPR/Marist poll and the weakest mark Marist has recorded since it began asking the question in 2019. The finding lands as 60% of Americans say they disapprove of the way he is handling the economy.
That drop matters because the economy remains one of Trump’s strongest political tests. His overall approval is 36%, also the lowest he has seen during his second term, and the numbers show a country still split between the voters who backed him and everyone else looking at the same prices and drawing a far different conclusion.
The latest poll suggests the damage is broader than one bad number. Marist found that 77% of people who voted for Trump in 2024 still approve of his handling of the economy, but that support is not enough to offset the erosion elsewhere. Among white voters without a college degree, 54% say they are unhappy with the way he is handling the economy, a reminder that even some of the voters who helped return him to office are now feeling pressure from the same costs that once fed his appeal.
Gas prices are part of that strain. They are down about 50 cents a gallon from last month, but they are still about 79 cents higher than they were a year ago. Patrick De Haan said there is still some very real pain, noting that the average fill-up is still in the ballpark of $8 to $16 more than it was a year ago. In the latest poll, 22% of Americans said they did not feel a strain from gas prices at all.
Lee Miringoff said Trump cannot escape the political cost of those prices. “It's Donald Trump, and that's where the slippage comes in,” he said, adding that he cannot get away with high prices at the pump and at the supermarket without being tarnished by them. That is the sharpest edge of the new poll: affordability problems are being tied directly to the presidency, even as many voters still separate their loyalty to Trump from their frustration with the economy.
The larger backdrop is that economic anxiety helped fuel Trump’s return to office, and his standing has slipped as that same anxiety has stayed in place. His overall approval has been trending down since March 2025, but the new PBS News/NPR/Marist result shows a deeper problem on the issue that most often decides whether voters give a president room to govern. Trump still has a firm base, but the record low in his economic approval suggests that the prices people see every day are beginning to matter more than the politics around them.
