The Daily - Trump’s National Support Is Cratering

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

A new major poll from The Times/Siena suggests that despite his seemingly unchecked power over the federal government and his own party, President Trump’s national support is crumbling to record lows and Democrats are poised to win back many of the key voters who got him into office in 2024. Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times, walks us through the poll’s results and what they mean for the midterms this fall. Guest: Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times. I cover American politics, with a focus on elections, public opinion, demographics and polling. Background reading:  A crack in the polling floor puts Mr. Trump in new territory. Photo: Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is The Daily. A major new poll from the Times suggests that despite his seemingly unchecked power over the federal government and his own party, President Trump's national support is crumbling to record lows, and Democrats are now poised to win back many of the key voters who made Trump president in 2024. Today, Chief Political Analyst, Nate Cohn, walks us through the poll's results and what they mean for this fall's midterm elections and the future of both parties. It's Friday, May 22nd. Hi, Nate.

Hello. How are you? I'm great. That was such an enthusiastic greeting. I had enough coffee, I guess. Well, I'm glad to have you in such high, energetic, caffeinated spirits. Well, it'll fade quickly, I promise. Nate, this big new poll that the Times conducted arrives at a really fascinating moment. Because if you're even a casual observer of American politics, you recognize that President Trump has racked up victory after victory after victory in his campaign to punish.

members of his party who he thinks has been disloyal in Indiana, in Louisiana, just a couple of lights ago in Kentucky. It's been really a historic flexing of his power within the Republican Party. But what you all found in this poll is that Trump's power over his party masks a real weakness and frankly an outright rejection of Trump nationally that's never been deeper and a level of democratic popularity that we haven't seen. in a really long time. So just summarize what you found here. We did not find very much good news for the president. We did find that a majority of Republicans

still support the president. So, you know, in that sense, the outcome of recent primary elections isn't very surprising. But beyond that core Republican base, the president has lost a tremendous amount of support. In terms of the president's approval rating, it was at just 37 percent. That is the lowest approval rating he's ever had in a Times Sienna poll. And we've been doing this poll for the entirety of his political life. Yep. And we're not alone on that. It's worth noting. The average of all the polls right now shows the president's approval rating is lower today than it has been at any time that he's been president going back to when he first took office in 2017. And this broad disillusionment has left the coalition that brought President Trump to the White House for a second time in tatters. The young and non-white voters who swung to President Trump in 2024 haven't just swung back.

towards the Democrats. They've now swung even farther toward the left than they were in 2020 when he lost the first time. Right. We'll get to that. Fascinating. And it appears to leave the Democrats in an increasingly strong position heading into the midterm elections. And that's not necessarily surprising on one level. The party out of power usually does well in the midterms. But this poll suggests they could do really, really well this November. Gotcha. I want to talk through each of these one by one. And let's start with the president's record low approval rating that this poll found. Because it feels like it changed our understanding of something that felt very well established in the Trump era. That's right.

For as long as Donald Trump has been president, it's been commonly said that there's a high floor on his support. Just explain that, just to find that. The idea is that Donald Trump can do all kinds of things that might ordinarily hurt a president politically, but that his base of support is so strong that his ratings can never fall that low. And historically, that floor has been around 38%. If you just look over his whole time as president, there have only been a handful of days where his approval rating on average has fallen beneath 38%.

Right, as Donald Trump would say, he could walk out on Fifth Avenue and do something quite untoward, and 38% of Americans would still support him. That's the basic idea. So our poll this week shows President Trump's approval rating at 37%. It's not necessarily hugely different from 38%.

Of course, that's a four-point decline, though, since our last poll in January. And it's part of a broader decline in the president's approval rating over the last year. So at best, we're looking at the president now having fallen to that floor, and we're wondering whether he's going to keep falling. And at worst, I think you can look at this poll and see all kinds of signs that the president's really falling through a level that he hasn't fallen before. And we have no reason to assume that he can't fall any further. When you look at the numbers and the survey on Iran or the cost of living, his approval ratings are even lower. So as long as those issues last and fester, they drag his approval rating even lower. Well, let's really explore the factors that you're starting to touch on here.

You mentioned the war. You mentioned the economy. But let's really talk through what the numbers are revealing there. In one way or another, it's almost everything that's dragging down the president's support. There aren't any bright spots for him in this poll. And frankly, there haven't been bright spots in our polling for months now. The president has alienated a large swath of Republican-leaning voters on almost every issue, generally because he's gone too far.

And on those two issues in particular, the cost of living and the conflict in the Middle East, the president's approval ratings are really bad. There's no nice way to put it. I mean, on the cost of living, he has a 28% approval. rating. Only 30% approve of his decision to go attack Iran. Even a modest number of the people who still approve of the president's performance overall are skeptical of what he's done on these two central issues. But it's also worth remembering that the president's standing on even his areas of relative strength don't look especially good on immigration, which was the best issue for the

president that we test in the poll. Only 41% of voters approve of his handling on that issue, where he has some real wins on, for instance, reducing the number of illegal border crossings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only 31% approve of his handling of that issue. So at risk of belaboring the point, there just aren't any bright spots that are helping to sustain the floor that we've seen for him in the past. Right. And as the president's popularity plunges, the voters who are disillusioned with him have to go somewhere. And you just said that key groups of voters, young and non-white voters, are moving from Trump to the Democrats. What strikes me about that is that Trump's ability to win those kinds of voters to peel them away from their historic allegiance to the Democrats back in 2024 was so singular and so effective that Nate, you and I spoke of the possibility that it could be a permanent realignment. But what you're suggesting now is that it's not the case.

Not right now. I mean, the president's approval rating among young and non-way voters, specifically Hispanic voters, I think, are working on, is extraordinarily bad under any circumstance, but it is even worse against the backdrop of what he was able to accomplish in 2024. Only, what was, 18 months ago, the president won more than 40 percent and perhaps more than 45 percent of Hispanic voters and 18, 29-year-olds. In our poll today, the president's approval rating among 18 to 20 to 20 years. In our poll today, the president's approval rating among 18 to 20, 29-year-olds is down to 19%. Wow. In half, basically. With 76% disapproving. And among Hispanic voters, it's a 20% approval rating with 71% disapproving. So that's not just rolling back the gains that he made in 2024. That's just losing a considerable amount of Hispanic and younger voters who would probably support Republican candidates under any circumstance.

So this is an enormous decline in the present support that extends really deep into traditional Republican support among two groups that they're usually Democratic, to be sure, but that usually have 30 or 40 percent who are willing to support a Republican candidate. Should we assume that these voters are swinging away from Trump and Republicans and toward Democrats because of the war, the cost of living? Or is there another added factor here? I mean, the short answer is yes. High prices were a major reason why young and non-white voters.

swung toward Donald Trump in the first place in 2024. And I think it's worth adding that even beyond the cost of living, Iran and immigration play important roles with these groups of voters that we're talking about. If you're 26 years old today, you've spent almost your entire life in a post-9-11 world where the United States has been engaged in military conflicts abroad. And one of the most important reasons why you might have supported Donald Trump in 2024 war was because he promised to keep the U.S. out of war. And now the United States is entangled in the Middle East yet again.

Many Latino voters, they didn't necessarily support Donald Trump because of his position on immigration. Maybe in some cases they supported him despite that position. And maybe in some cases, Latino voters who backed Donald Trump sympathized with the critique of the Biden-era immigration policy that led to many millions of people entering the United States without authorization. But when they backed Donald Trump, they were not necessarily. doing so because they anticipated ice entering Minneapolis or sending people to overseas detention

camps and El Salvador and the other excesses of the Trump administration's immigration policy. Right. So I think you can tell a pretty easy story about how all of the major issues that have defined Trump's terms so far have had a strong effect on his support among these particular groups. You suggested that all this disillusionment and disapproval among these voters is good for the Democrats. And I wonder how you know that and why you don't suspect that it might just lead to apathy when it comes to both parties. Well, if I may, I think it will probably contribute to apathy. It would not surprise me to see many of these Trump voters stay home rather than cast a ballot

for the Democrats. That said, when we ask voters who they intend to vote for in the midterm election, the Democrats have built a significant 10-point lead in this poll. Wow. That's very meaningful. It's very meaningful. It's much larger, by the way, than all of our prior polls this cycle. And that lead is built in no small part on the Democrats reclaiming and even expanding upon their traditional advantage among young and non-white voters. They're up by nearly 40 points among 18 to 29-year-olds, for instance. Wow. So, again, young voters often stay home in elections. It would not surprise me to see many young voters stay home in this year's midterm election as well. But the young voters who do turn up, I would expect to be very. supportive of Democratic candidates for Congress based on this poll. Got it. So this poll finds that Trump's loss is very much Democrats gains, 10 points gain, when it comes to the upcoming midterm elections in the fall for control of Congress. That's what this poll is showing. Yep. And maybe it's worth putting a finer point on what that would mean. It would easily allow the Democrats to retake the House, despite the Republican efforts to redraw congressional.

maps of their favor in much of the country. And it would also have a real chance to put the Senate into play, even though to flip the Senate, the Democrats would need to win some very Republican states. Understood. So these numbers you're saying are sufficiently good for Democrats, sufficiently bad for Trump and Republicans, that no matter how far behind the Democrats may be falling in the gerrymandering redistricting battles, and it seems they are starting to fall pretty meaningfully behind the Republicans, based on some court rulings and just general Republican boldness here, that the Democrats will still, based on this poll, that's if this election were today, they would perform very well in the midterms, probably retake the House, maybe retake the Senate.

You got it. Now, it's important to note that just because young and non-white voters are going to support Democrats by a wide margin of midterm election doesn't mean that they're now loyal Democrats. In fact, many of these voters don't identify as Democrats or say they're dissatisfied with the Democrats. And I think one of the most interesting parts of the poll is how it shows the extent of deep divisions within both of the parties right now. And those divisions will do a lot to shape the direction of the two parties heading into the next presidential election. We'll be right back. Nate, tell us what this poll reveals about the internal divisions inside the Democratic and Republican Party

that we should be watching closely even beyond the midterms. Let's start with Democrats. I thought the poll was pretty clarifying on what divides Democrats and maybe more importantly, what really doesn't, you know, in the elite discourse

since Kamala Harris's defeat in 2024, Democratic wanks and activists and policymakers have been arguing about whether the Democrats should move toward the center or embrace a more progressive left-wing kind of politics. Right. But the poll didn't really show a ton of dissatisfaction on ideological lines. That's interesting. Democrats basically thought that they were okay with where the party was. A majority of Democrats

say that the party's not too far to the left or too far to the center. Only 20% either way say the party is too far to the left or too far to the right. That's quite notable because we think of the Democratic brand as being really damaged. but this poll is suggesting when it comes to ideology and positions, that's not what voters see as the damage. At least not within the Democratic Party, to be clear. We're talking about voters who lean Democratic. So it's possible that there are lost Trump voters, for instance, who wouldn't have been captured here, who are upset about the Democratic Party's position. But among those who are in the Democratic coalition, they're not that upset about the party's ideological positioning.

they are, however, dissatisfied with the Democrats. And the clearest reason for that is because they don't think that the party has succeeded in stopping Trump, whether that's in Washington or in the last campaign. So what upsets them is their perception of their party's leaders

as ineffective encountering Trump, even though it does feel like Democratic leaders over the past few months have tried to do that, shutting down the government over health care costs, shutting down the government, over immigration tactics is not enough. That's right.

I mean, when you hone in on that group of Democrats who say they're dissatisfied with the party, more than three quarters of them say that they don't think that the Democratic Party is doing enough to fight back against Donald Trump. Now, I think it's reasonable to say that the Democrats don't have that many opportunities

to fight back against Donald Trump. And I think it's also worth wondering how much of this is still about the Democrats' failure to stop him from winning power in the first place. I think this can just this question be a proxy for a broader sense that the party has failed in the central mission over the last 10 years, which is stopping Donald Trump's presidency. So I think the dissatisfaction that voters have here is fairly understandable if you look at it in a broader context. Right. Well, beyond effectively fighting Trump, what does this poll say, according to Democratic voters you all surveyed, about the positions that folks in the party want their leaders to take when they do take those positions?

Yeah, we asked about this in a couple of ways. To the extent they want the party to move to the left or the right, they'd rather see it move a little toward the center. But not too much. There aren't like issues where they want the Democrats to embrace the conservative view on, say, transgender issues or something like that. But they would like to see the party somehow moderate a little bit on these cultural issues, maybe without moving to the right. And they would like to see some kind of economic populism. That's where they were likeliest to say they want to see the party to move to the left. And when we asked voters whether they'd rather have a Democrat who wanted the lower prices by expanding the housing supply or lower prices by cracking down on corporate monopolies, they said by nearly a three to one margin that they'd rather have the party cracked down on corporate monopolies.

So in this particular case, this is an example of Democratic-leaning voters being quite receptive to a more economically populist approach, one that goes hard after billionaires, corporations. you know the list, and it would represent a real shift toward the left compared to recent Democrats like Kamala Harris. And I'd also point out that they overwhelmingly oppose Israel. They're more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis, which has been true for some time. They also oppose additional military aid to Israel. Taking all of this together, the Democratic base isn't really looking for a candidate who's going to move the party far to the center or far towards the left, but they would like someone who's fairly populous on economic issues, and they also really would like to see a candidate who's an opponent of Israel.

And it so happens that when I look at the Democrats who have been doing best lately in Democratic primaries, I see a lot of candidates who fit that billing, regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum. I think about Zoran Mondani winning in New York. On the other end of the spectrum, I might think of John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia who's been earning accolades from across the Democratic Party for a kind of anti-corruption style of populism. And then maybe right in the middle, I'd put Graham Platner. Not a socialist, definitely a progressive,

definitely running on a populist economic platform. I think you can see in all of these candidates, Democrats succeeding, at least with Democratic voters, by adopting a position that looks a lot like what we see in this poll. Nate, am I right to think that the ultimate test of whether Democrats are out of the rut that they've been in for years will be whether the voters who fled the Democrats for Trump in 2024 and seem like they might be coming back to the Democrats for the midterms,

that they will stay with the Democrats after the midterms. And are the candidates you're talking about here and the message they're espousing likely to appeal to young voters, black voters, Latino voters, beyond the midterms? Well, I do have to say that I think it's a slightly different question. The Democrats have an internal problem. to solve. Can we come up with a candidate who bridges our divides, who we can all rally behind? And then there's a question of whether that candidate can succeed in the general election.

I do happen to think that the combination of attributes that we've been talking about, economic populism, de-emphasis on cultural issues, and opposition to Israel would play pretty well with all of young, black, and Latino voters in 2028. But I think that the core task that the party is trying to solve for right now is an internal one that even precedes how to try and win over voters in the general election. To take a different example, the Republicans have solved these problems for themselves, right? They want to beat the party of Donald Trump, and that may cost them the 2026 and 2028 election, but they know who they are. Okay, well, since you're starting to do the Republican side of this equation, let's complete that thought.

What are the fractures within the Republican Party that this poll exposes, knowing that Republicans are pretty unified and agree that their party is Trump's party and about Trump's agenda. Let's just start by reiterating that last point before we go into the divisions. The Republican Party is mostly unified behind Donald Trump. Not only do they approve of Donald Trump's performance as president today,

they also would like the next Republican candidate for president to follow Donald Trump's lead rather than go in a new direction. And they want to follow Donald Trump's lead. on every issue that we asked about. So the overarching story here is much clear on the Republican side than it is on the Democratic side. Right. That said, there is a meaningful minority of Republicans who don't approve the president's conduct and who would like to see the Republican presidential candidate go in a new direction. These voters are disproportionately young and non-white, and in fact, a majority of 18 to 44-year-olds in the poll want to see the next Republican

president take the party in a new direction, and a majority of non-white Republicans want to see the next presidential candidate take the party in any direction, and they say so by wide two-to-one margins. On the issues, it seems pretty clear that the cost of living in foreign policy are crucial points of discontent. So this is a very different kind of opposition to Donald Trump than the one that you might remember from the so-called never-trumpers back in 2016, who opposed Donald Trump because he was an isolationist and opposed free trade and opposed comprehensive

immigration reform. This new kind of dissatisfaction from young and non-white Republicans is in many cases because he hasn't necessarily followed through with his promise to put America first, as he would put it. Right. Instead, he has gone from being an isolationist back in 2016 to becoming an interventionist and starting the very kind of war in the Middle East that he very successfully lured young non-white voters to the Republican Party by saying he would never pursue. That's right. And again, the generational divide here is really stark on all of the foreign policy issues, young Republicans under age 44, they line up against him and often by wide two to one or more margins. I'll also note, by the way, that that includes the question of Republican support for Israel. A majority of young Republicans think that Donald Trump is too supportive of Israel and disapprove of his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So that's very different from what we've seen before from Republicans. And I will say that it happens to echo something we have seen in the elite discourse among Republicans.

We've seen prominent podcasters like Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan or even Nick Fuentes take these positions on Israel and Trump's foreign policy that we can see echoed in public opinion among younger Republicans. Nate, we're spending a lot of time talking about divisions within these two parties and this key group of voters, especially young, non-white voters. what message from either party could bring them in. But it occurs to me, based on past conversations I've had with you over the years, that that conversation might not be hugely relevant if we have a president whose approval numbers are this low. And those numbers, as you said earlier, might continue to fall. Am I right in thinking that? If by relevant, you mean relevant to determining which party wins the 2028 general election.

You read me correctly. then I think you have a fair point. The president's approval rating is under 40. The Democrats would be pretty clearly favored to win in 2028. There's no precedent for the president's party retaining the White House when his approval rating is under 40%, let alone even lower than that. And I think the clearest example of that in recent memory is what happened to George W. Bush. I mean, in almost this exact time 20 years ago, George W. Bush's approval rating fell under 40%

to about the number where Donald Trump is today, thanks to a combination. of Quagmire in the Middle East and high gas prices. And while it took a while, his ratings kept falling and ultimately landed in the 20s. And the Democrats, of course, won decisively in the 2008 general election. Barack Obama won by seven points, and they came out of that election with nearly filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a large majority in the House of Representatives. Now, obviously, this is a more polarized era, whether the Democrats can appeal as broadly as Barack Obama did in 2008 is an open question.

But when the presence approval rating starts sinking lower than the 40s and you start giving up traditional Republican-leaning voters, the opportunities for a more decisive Democratic victory start to come into view. Right. I just want to end on a simple observation. Normally, this would be the moment for people inside a party, like the one Trump leads, to look around, especially in Congress, and say, man, this is not going well. And they would start to break with the president.

They would start to resist his agenda in areas like the war in Iran where it's clear, broadly, nationally, voters don't like what he's doing. But what is so singular about Trump is that his holdover the party through these primaries where he's pushing out anyone who ever resists him means that everyone is holding on to the same steering wheel that he is in this moment. And they're all, when I use this metaphor earlier this week in a different episode, kind of driving the car towards the same electoral cliff it would seem. I think that's absolutely right. I mentioned earlier that a majority of Republicans want to follow Donald Trump's lead in 2028,

rather than go in a new direction. Well, the general electorate wants a new direction by a three-to-one margin. That's a big disconnect between the general electorate's desires and what the Republican Party is about to give the general electorate. And, you know, for all of the talk about the challenges facing the Democratic Party, that mismatch seems like the biggest one to me. We've had change election after change election over the last two decades. If the Republican Party really wants to serve the general electorate, the same thing again,

I think that they would be in a lot of trouble in 26 and 28. Well, Nate, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. On Thursday evening, after we spoke with Nate, congressional Republicans finally seemed to lose their patience with President Trump. Republican senators staged a rare rebellion against the president's $1.8 billion compensation fund, which could pay his political allies, including January 6th rioters. I think it's stupid on stilts.

What? Because it will invariably put us in a position where your taxpayer dollars and my taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned, and now we're going to pay them for that? To protest the controversial fund, Republican senators refused to vote on a bill to finance Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration, which was scheduled for Thursday evening. Shortly after, reporters asked the president about the rebellion at the White House.

Are you losing control of the Senate, Senate Republic? I don't know. I really don't know. I can tell you. I only do what's right. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day. On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee released a draft of an internal autopsy of what went wrong in the 2024 presidential campaign. It found that President Biden had failed to position Kamala Harris for success by the time he dropped out of the race, that Harris failed to distance herself from Biden's damaged brand, and that Trump's attacks on Harris's past positions, especially her liberal approach to transgender rights, had been highly effective. In the end, the report said, the Harris campaign failed to make

a strong enough case to Americans to vote for Harris rather than just against President Trump. Today's episode was produced by Mary Wilson, Chris Bendereth, and Mood Sadie. It was edited by Patricia Willens and Rachel Custer, and contains music by Roe Misto, Dan Powell, and Marion Lazzano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bobaro. See you on Sunday.