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⬆️Why, for at least the last 6 months, do I keep reading that Trump’s favorability rating has “dropped to a new low of 37%”?
There is a third option: Undecided -- and fewer and fewer people are in the neutral camp. This should really be reported as the delta between Favorable and Unfavorable, which IS at an all time low as more people are willing to commit to an opinion!
I am a paid subscriber to G. Elliott Morris's Substack "Strength in Numbers". This post is shown as "for paid subscribers only", but I will quote a few pertinent passages below the link:
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The big story in the new NYT/Siena poll isn't Trump's 37% approval (although that's very bad) — it's a 24-point swing among persuadable voters.
According to the Times‘ poll, political independents now favor the Democrats in their congressional races by 18 percentage points. And Americans who did not vote in the 2024 election give the Democratic Party a 31-point margin.
For independents, the swing left since 2024 is roughly 17 points. The Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, released in June 2025, found that independents (including those who lean toward a party) split exactly 48-48 between Trump and Harris in 2024 — a sharp move from 2020, when this group had favored Biden by nine points. In our polling, that 48-48 group now backs Democratic House candidates by 17 points.
Nine in ten registered voters in the Times poll say they plan to participate in November, and Democratic voters are eight points more likely than Republicans to say they are “almost certain” to turn out. Second, the non-voter shift represents a huge swing from 2024.
Last cycle, according to Pew, non-voters leaned toward Trump over Harris by four percentage points, 44% to 40%. Pew arrives at this number by surveying thousands of Americans on their vote intention before the election. They later grouped respondents by whether they actually voted in the election, based on public records published by individual states.
Today, the Democratic margin among non-voters is +20 points — a 24-point shift since 2024. That is the largest pro-Democratic swing in any subgroup of the electorate we measure, and it has been at or above double digits in nine of our eleven monthly polls.
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The post contains a chart of Trump' favorability since his Jan 2025 inauguration:
Jan 2025: Net favorability ~ +12
Late Feb 2025 -Disapprove crosses over Approve
Since Feb 2025 the gap has grown pretty steadily to the point that his Net Favorability is now a whopping - 23
