Donald Trump’s polls have been catastrophic for a president whose party is headed into mid-terms. And they keep getting worse.
From Fifty Pls One on Substack:
Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump stood in front of a crowd of supporters at a first-of-its-kind midterms convention and beseeched the American people to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” Updated polling averages from FiftyPlusOne show he got what he asked for, but not in the way he wanted.
As of 11:00 AM on September 23, 2026, our average of polls gives the president a new low of 34.6% approval among U.S. adults, with a disapproval rating of 62.3%. Over the last week, he has hit new second-term lows in surveys from at least 7 polling firms: CNN/SSRS, Ipsos, NBC News, Strength In Numbers/Verasight, Quantus Insights, Echelon Insights, and American Research Group.
While the president has been sliding, the Republican Party’s deficit in the the U.S. House generic ballot has increased to 7.6 points, rounding to +8 points for the first time this cycle and rivaling the party’s lead in the 2018 blue wave:
Our historical polling averages show the president’s updated rating is worse than George W. Bush’s second-term approval rating on the eve of the 2006 midterm that cost Republicans both chambers of Congress. And public mood is approaching where it was toward Richard Nixon during Watergate, in the months before he resigned in disgrace.
And:
Trump’s problem, simply put, is that he is the most unpopular president since at least the 1930s, when scientific polling was developed, to hold office at this point before a midterm election.
If we widen the comparison from 2017 to include every president’s first term back to Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 — 13 of them — the president sticks out like a sore thumb. (Harry Truman doesn’t belong in this group: he succeeded FDR unelected in 1945, so his own elected term, which began in 1949, is conventionally counted as his second term. He shows up in the next chart.) At the same point in their first terms, every single one of Trump’s predecessors was in better shape than he is right now. Carter, the name people usually reach for when they want an unpopular president, was within a point of break-even.
GO HERE to read the entire post and to subscribe to FiftyPlusOne.
Image: Shutterstock.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.