America's Talking - Trump approval rating at 48% in October, poll finds

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

(The Center Square) – A new poll shows that President Donald Trump’s approval rating reached 48% in October, a number mostly bolstered by Republicans. The Center Square Voters' Voice Poll, conducted by Noble Predictive Insights, surveyed 2,565 registered voters from Oct. 2-6, 2025. Half of voters surveyed objected to how Trump is handling his job as president, with 10% somewhat disapproving and 40% strongly disapproving. Nearly 30% strongly approve of his performance and 19% somewhat approve.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxx Read more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_46bb4e11-106f-4b66-ae3e-c4ae3066e281.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America's Talking, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan Mc Caleb, executive editor at the Center Square Newswire Service. The Center Square this week launches latest polling. The Center Square Voters' Voice poll is among the most comprehensive in the country. We surveyed 2,565 registered voters, 978 identified as Republicans, 948 as Democrats, and 639 as Independence. It is one of the only six national tracking polls in the country. joining me to discuss some of the polling results is the Center Square National Team reporter, Brett Rowland.

Brett, why don't we start with President Donald Trump's approval rating? What did our polling show there? So this was pretty interesting. Trump's approval rating is about 48%. About half the country likes him, about half the country doesn't like him. Maybe a little bit more on the dislike side, according to our poll, which had a margin of error of about 2%. But what's really interesting here is that Trump's approval rating is very much tied to his economic approval or the job people think he's doing on the economy. So we pulled on both issues and the results were strikingly similar for those two questions. And it's clear to us just by looking at the data that Trump's, that voters are looking at Trump's handling. of the economy. Trump's got a big coalition behind them.

Republicans, obviously, men tend to prefer Trump more than women. Millennials have some appeal for him, college-educated folks, those households over $100,000, making over $100,000 a year, and those in rural areas. But Trump's also got some tough spots, too, here. It looks like he's underwereux. he's underwater on the economy, which was a key issue for him going into the 2024 election. I mean, he told voters again and again, you know, do you like the way things are going?

And voters apparently did not and chose Trump. But now Trump's got to deal with that same issue. He's got a tough economy. He's made a bunch of moves that are controversial, including tariffs. and people generally, according to our polling, don't think he's doing enough to address their biggest concern, which when we pulled on top issues, by far the top issue was price increases and the cost of everyday goods.

So those pocketbook issues are really catching up right now. Even though it's not anywhere near the level of during President Biden's term, particularly in 2022, inflation is still a thing. So inflation is running about 3%, which is about a one percentage point higher than where the Federal Reserve would like it. It's much lower than in 2022 when inflation peaked. But voters still very much remember those issues. And when we talk to our pollster, Mike Noble, he said that there tends to be some sort of a bias as to what has happened recently. So they look at those 2002 increases and they don't see much relief between. then between those prices and though inflation has decreased, they don't see their bills going down. They see insurance premiums going up. They see the cost of ground beef going up, which, by the way, I noticed at the supermarket this week, too. So the cost of everything seems to be higher and people are not happy about it.

And we also ask voters what their top three issues are facing them. And it was pocketbook issues faced at the top. So there's some correlation there. Yeah. So the economy was also up there. jobs. And surprisingly, the one that I didn't expect to be among those top issues was government corruption. So that one was interesting to me. We've pulled on this issue for a couple of cycles now, and we've seen these numbers fluctuate a little bit. We saw, right in the lead up to the election,

we saw illegal immigration was a key issue. Donald Trump was pretty effective on that. And that has really dropped in our polling. But the prices, has a budged really. It remains in that top spot. It remains the thing that the people are focused on. The economy and jobs is right up there. So people are frustrated with that issue. They do think that when we when we talked to Mike Noble, he did say that Trump is likely the victim of his own success on the immigration issues. But I think that those pocketbook issues will be top of mind for voters going into the midterms. You referenced Mike Noble. Let me just give him a brief plug here. He is Mike Noble with Noble

Predictive Insights based out of Arizona. They are a polling company. We've been working with them for several years to put these comprehensive polls out. Some sort of side issues that we asked about, Brett, and that one of them that you wrote about this week that had to do with the Department of Government Efficiency, which President Trump created early on in his administration. What do voters think about the efficiency and the effectiveness of Doge? This was really interesting and one that I had been hoping to look at. We've pulled on this issue in the past or Doge-like issues in the past. So in the past we had sort of pulled on like, do you think government debt is too high

and what programs, if anything, do you think you should cut from the federal government? So voters are real clear that they think that the federal debt is a problem. But when you ask them what they want to cut, The answers aren't as clear cut, and it gets a lot more difficult for them to identify things that they actually want to cut as opposed to just reducing the federal debt as, you know, in a vacuum per se. But the other thing that we found out about Doge is it's like much of what else is going on in the political arena. It is very much a partisan issue. So Republicans generally supported Doge. Democrats did not.

independents were more in the middle, but there was still kind of there was still a fair amount of opposition. And then the more interesting question to me was that, you know, we also pulled our respondents on what they, would they like to see Doge in their home state? And here again, it was really, really partisan. Republicans want it. Democrats don't, Democrats don't think it's effective. Republicans think it's effective. But there's some gap to. in both parties, which is interesting to me. There's some Republicans, perhaps, who don't think it goes far enough. Some Democrats obviously think it goes way too far. But one of the most interesting things for me to remember about Doge is that we were promised, or Trump pledged a pretty

significant operation here. He said it was going to be the Manhattan Project of our time, and that we were really going to sort of get all this waste, fraud, and abuse out of government. The last time we got a solid update from Doge, they're on track to cut about $150 billion from federal spending. That's well below what Elon Musk initially promised, which was $2 trillion. He cut that in half to about $1 trillion, and then now we're down at about $150 billion. Now, I think the other number that's important to remember is that during the Biden administration, the tail end of the Biden administration, the government accountability office gave us a number. for the first time ever on what they think was the total amount of waste, fraud, and abuse

in the federal government. And they pegged the number at about $500 billion. So we're not there yet. To use one story quickly before we wrap up here, Brett, this weekend. We're going to have a story we pulled of the same voters on whether they think President Donald Trump, whether they supported his designating Antifa as a domestic terror organization, the Center Square Zone, Sarah Roderick Fitch asked the president that question, and within a week he did declare them a national terror organization. Listeners can listen to that story and all of our polling stories at thecentersquare.com.