Trump’s approval with independents sinks below Biden’s, Trump’s post-Jan. 6 | Weekly roundup for July 27, 2025, by G. Elliott Morris

This week in political data: Gallup’s newsy poll; Pew benchmark data; Senate race ratings; Manufacturing prices increase; and AI disrupting news traffic.

Dear readers,

Welcome back to Strength In Numbers. This is your Sunday briefing covering new data on politics and public opinion.

Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for our July poll with Verasight. This month’s survey turned up some interesting insights, and I look forward to reading more suggested topics for August!

Trump hits new record low with independents

The poll I saw circulating most online this week is a new Gallup survey of Trump’s first six months in office. Gallup finds Trump with a 37% approval rating among adults (a new low across all pollsters) and losing ground on all issues.

Strikingly, Gallup finds that just 38% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling immigration, and 37% approve of his job on the economy — the two issues that probably won him the 2024 election. Trump has lost double digits on handling the federal budget and 6 points on trade/tariffs.

The 37% rating is definitely headline-making, but it’s Trump’s approval with independents that caught my attention.

According to Gallup, just 29% of independents — fewer than one in three swing voters — approve of how Trump is doing as president today. Here’s Gallup’s chart of approval by party affiliation:

It’s hard to characterize just how bad 29% approval with independents is. You can explain the number in a couple of ways: First, 29% is somewhere between 11 and 17 percentage points lower than the president’s share of the vote with independents in the 2024 election (VoteCast says 40%, Edison says 46%). That means that roughly one out of every three political independents who voted for Trump in the 2024 election now says they disapprove of how he’s governing.

As it turns out, 29% among independents is also a record low for Trump, according to Gallup. Here is their trend for Trump among indies in his first term. He bottomed out at 30% after the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021.

Yes, according to Gallup, Trump’s approval rating with independents is now lower than it was after Jan. 6.

As a final point of comparison, Trump is now about as unpopular with independents as Joe Biden was during the worst point of his presidency. Biden bottomed out at 27% among independents in Dec. 2023, when media sentiment toward the economy hit a post-COVID low. And this isn’t just a Gallup thing; other polls show Biden hitting a bottom close to 30% over his term.

That’s pretty bad! Still, Trump has mostly been able to push through his unpopular agenda in Congress, so the political consequences of a 29% approval rating with independents are questionable. In terms of electoral consequences, though, the party in the White House is not winning elections when the president is only getting one in three independents.

Deixe um comentário

Este site utiliza o Akismet para reduzir spam. Fica a saber como são processados os dados dos comentários.