Donald Trump’s approval rating slipped into the low 30s across three new polls released this week, a fresh run of numbers that shows him at 34 percent, 33 percent and 32 percent support. For a president who has been underwater for much of his time back in office, the repeated slide below 40 percent is the part that stands out.
The survey put Trump at 34 percent approval, -NORC had him at 33 percent and Quinnipiac found him at 32 percent. In the poll, 73 percent of respondents said Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, while 58 percent said they were dissatisfied or angry about his D.C. renovation projects. That kind of split matters because it does not read like a temporary mood swing; it reads like a broad judgment on how he is using his time in office.
Tatishe Nteta said polling that keeps slipping under the 40 percent mark is a shift in public opinion that is dangerously outside the norm for a sitting president. He said presidents usually live in something closer to a 40-40 split between hard approval and hard disapproval, which makes Trump’s current standing more than just weak — it makes it unusual. That is one reason the numbers are landing now, as candidates begin buckling down for the midterms and look for lines of attack that do not require much explanation.
Still, the picture is not perfectly uniform. The Argument, which surveyed 3,000 registered voters between July 20 and July 26, found Trump at 39 percent approval, with 47 percent strongly disapproving and another 10 percent in the somewhat disapprove camp. That result is higher than the other surveys, but it does not change the larger pattern: even the more forgiving reading leaves Trump stuck below the level presidents usually need to look politically secure.
A separate poll from Navigator Research pointed to the forces dragging him down, saying gas prices and the costly war in Iran were driving many voters away from him. The survey does not break out how much each factor matters on its own, but the broader story is clear enough. Trump’s approval numbers have been bad practically since he returned to office and began his tariff regime, and they have looked especially damaged since the full cost of the war in Iran started hitting financial markets. Heading into the midterms, that leaves Democrats with a simple opening and Trump with a harder problem: the week’s polling does not just show an unpopular president, it shows one whose standing is still struggling to find a floor.
