Early voting was underway for the midterms as Donald Trump tried once again to sell voters on a version of reality that polls and fact-checkers have spent years dismantling. The immediate question for voters is not whether he can repeat his claims, but whether enough people still believe them.
That is a sharper test now because Trump won two elections by persuading millions of people to accept his boasts and promises, then returned in 2024 with a fresh set of pledges that have not come close to matching the record he is defending. He said he would cut the cost of a new home in half, bring gasoline below $2 a gallon, bring interest rates way down, end Russia's war against Ukraine in 24 hours, and bring energy and electricity prices down by half, at least.
The numbers now cutting against him are hard to dismiss. An -NORC Center Public Affairs Research poll published on Oct. 1 found that 71 percent of adult Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the war, and 65 percent say his policies have caused high prices that created an affordability crisis. The latest average of polls from shows less than 40 percent of voters approve of his overall performance in office. That is the kind of standing that forces a politician to explain himself, not just repeat himself.
Trump is still trying. On Oct. 1 he said, “Everyone thinks the prices are high because of me, but they're not.” He also said, “We have the greatest [economic] numbers of any president in the history of our country.” And when asked about his weak standing, he shrugged it off by saying, “The only thing we're doing badly at is public relations.”
But the gap between his words and the record is what makes the current political moment so damaging. His war of choice against Iran has lasted more than seven months, even though he said it would last less than eight weeks. His tariffs on imported products and the war are widely seen as part of the reason prices remain high, and the promise that he would bring costs down has become one more claim voters can measure against what they see at the store.
Trump’s instinct is to blame the messengers. He told a Time Magazine journalist that his polls had never been lower, then answered, “They're fake numbers. … The pollsters are corrupt.” That line may still work with his hardest supporters, but it does not square with the broader picture from pollsters and fact-checkers who have spent years documenting his habit of making things up or stretching them past recognition.
Daniel Dale said that by September 2020 he had recorded more than 8,500 false claims by Trump since September 2016. The Washington Post’s fact-checking team put the number at 30,573 false and misleading statements during his first term, and said he reached 503 in a single day before the 2020 presidential election. Trump still falsely claims he won that election, a refusal to concede reality that helps explain why so many voters no longer give his promises much weight.
The consequence is straightforward: the midterms are opening with Trump in the same position that has followed him for years, depending on repetition while asking voters to ignore the record in front of them. An Economist-YouGov poll in September found only 21 percent of Americans believe he will keep his promise to send every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep control. If early voting is any guide, the bigger question now is not whether Trump can make the claims again, but how many voters are still willing to take them seriously.
