Weekly Skews - Good Skews: Donald Trump's Approval Raiting with John Ray of YouGov Blue

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

In this episode of Good Skews, Producer Hildreth sits down with John Ray from YouGov Blue to unpack the latest polling data and what it actually tells us about the 2024 political landscape. John shares some cautiously optimistic views, including waning support for Trump among key voter blocs like young men and communities of color.Support the show

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of good skews. We're going to talk today with John Ray about some of the polling that we've been seeing out there. It's not as bad as we might expect. It's not as bad as maybe it feels. Obviously, it's not all good news, but there is some good news. So John's going to walk us through that. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for that on me, Matt. Do you want to talk a little bit about your background? What brought you into the polling world before we jump into some of the numbers you've been looking at? Sure, everybody. I'm John. I work at UGov. Specifically, I work at UGov Blue, which is our political team. I've been doing this for years and years. My background, I've basically been in politics for my career. I kind of had kind of the reverse revelation that many people do in college. I began life as an art student and as a filmmaker and I one day picked up a stats textbook and liked that shit

better. And so I switched over to being a nerd instead. And here we are. I've actually been a pollster basically for my entire career where I've not been busy being in school. And so we've worked together, Matt, for at least the past few years on various forms of rural research in that regard. So happy to be on. Excellent. Well, maybe talk a little bit about what polling can and can't tell us. I think maybe some of the times that people are frustrated about the polling if it feels wrong or

it doesn't really line up with what they're seeing, they get a little bit frustrated. And obviously there's good pulling and bad polling and pulling can be wrong. But when you are out in the field as a pollster, how are you thinking about the questions you're asking and what information do you hope will come from that? Maybe start there.

We could talk a little bit about what polls don't really tell us. Yeah. So I think often when people experience that frustration, when they see something that, you know, they're seeing in a survey that is really at odds with their intuitions, a couple of the things that I'm dealing with when I have surveys in the field where something like that might be the case is it's important to remember that a pollster is often trying to ask somebody about something the way that they would understand it. So what we all need to remember in our brains is that, for example, as I'm sure you've heard before, the median voter is a 55-year-old person who does not have a college degree. And often when they are hearing about political information, first of all, they usually aren't. Most people are not political junkies. They're not thinking about the details and nuance of public policy really at any given time until it's very shortly before an election if they're going to vote. But often, it's just people kind of live in their lives. And so, Sometimes when we field questions, we get a lot of feedback that's like, well, if you'd included this information, people would have thought about it this way, if you'd phrase it this way. All of that stuff may very well be true, but what we're trying to do is really ask people about something the way that they would have heard about it kind of in their daily life.

So we try and ask about things, you know, that would make sense to somebody whose political knowledge comes from a few minutes of having the news on per day on average, which is about sort of where we are. With that also in mind, we are currently, as everybody listening to this knows, we're in an era where the news moves very, very quickly. And so when a pollster reminds you that a poll is just a snapshot in time, we really do mean that. We do sort of stand by that as a substantive thing to keep in mind. There's been quite a lot of movement up and down, not just for Trump, but on a whole host of issues over the course of sort of his political career, things move very, very quickly in that regard. And so just because,

I come to you with something that says, hey, this thing that you like, you know, maybe it's not as popular as you thought. On the one hand, I guess you should keep that in mind because the people who are really reading polls closely are just categorically different from like the normal person, frankly. But then two, let's also remember that public opinion does in fact move on a lot of stuff over time.

So sometimes, you know, the bad news just ain't bad news. Sometimes that just means you have your work cut out for you. Right. And there's always a challenge, especially when it comes to polling that is trying to predict upcoming elections with knowing who's going to actually show up on election day. So if you are doing a poll and you say, you know, 60% of likely voters think this, 40% of likely voters think that, that makes sense. But on election day, if more people turn out than you expected or less people turn out, that changes kind of everything. So talk a little bit about what we can't take from the polling and maybe things that people are reading too much into polling and maybe should be taking things with a little bit more of a grain of salt. Yeah, I think the way that you phrased it just now is really one of the key things to keep in mind, which is that the electorate changes a lot from cycle to cycle.

Many people are sort of what you would call just like high propensity voters, like they just view voting as their civic duty and will turn out. but on the other end of the spectrum, there actually are a lot of people who are really on the fence, not just about who they're going to vote for, but whether they're going to vote at all. And I think that is one of the really tricky questions that pollsters wrestle with a lot. They come up as sort of their own kind of way to figure out sort of who should be in that population. We're pretty good at it, you know, in my opinion. But obviously, what we're talking about is a moving target in that nobody in the U.S. is required to vote. Nobody inherently owes any politician their vote for any reason. And so it's a world

where the actual, the jargonic phrase we would use is the composition of the electorate, which just means who's actually going to vote on election day. A big chunk of those people are really kind of hard to figure out until you're really close to an election. Part of what that also means is that the concerns of those people over time, often a pollster won't really note to ask about sort of those people's concerns until it's already become kind of apparent in some other sense. So you see a lot of this in public polling that's really kind of focused on current events. Current events kind of can move so quickly that the thing that we went in the field to ask about, particularly when it relates to Trump, which changes his mind every 20 minutes, the nature of what we're asking about can actually

change really quickly, which means that sometimes you want to ask about something and you literally just don't have historical data about it. So, for example, when Trump came forward one day and said he wanted to just buy Greenland, that's not something that would occur to most people to measure people's opinions about. We're not thinking a lot about the Greenland purchase. And so that's something that we had to measure once it was already in a place where the president had taken a position on it because the fact that you had that position kind of defined why it was worthy to measure people's opinions about. So we need to keep that in mind as well.

Particularly right now, I think an interesting case of that is that there's an ongoing question for pollsters about like social media is changing and evolving so rapidly that how we measure how people use platforms is really an open question. So for example, we don't know to include blue sky on a survey until it becomes apparent to us in some sense that there are enough Blue Sky users where that's worth of, worthy of our time. But that means that you don't have kind of the first, you know, few kind of months of the existence of Blue Sky in your historical data because there are a billion Twitter clones out there. You don't know which one is going to make it. It doesn't make sense to include all of them on a survey, but that means that, you know,

surveys have kind of a starting point in what people can kind of see going on in the world around them, which keep in mind as well. All right. So we should be taking all of this with a little bit of a grain of salt. Polls are definitely helpful, especially when we're comparing one poll of a specific audience to another poll of that same specific audience with tracking polls and things like that. So they can be incredibly helpful, but I think maybe sometimes are a little bit too overplayed in the media. I think sometimes polling is presented almost like it's a scoreboard during a soccer or football or hockey or baseball match where you sort of say the score is this today and the score is that tomorrow, that's sort of true in some tracking polls, but if you get that

turnout number wrong or you don't have all of the factors correct, it's only as good as the information that you're putting in there. So it's more of an estimate of what the score is. It's not the actual score. But I digress. So talk a little bit about the good news that you're seeing in the polling. That's, I think, what we're all wanting to hear. Where are you seeing some silver linings in this apocalyptic cluster fuck? Yeah. So as we look out across the sort of post-apocalyptic landscape here, if we look back to the pre-apocalyptic landscape, Trump walked into office for a second term with just a lot of good news for him on a day-to-day basis. His polling at the beginning of his second term was actually quite strong. He was sort of, you know, for example, he was outright above water among young people. He had quite good favorabilities among black and Latino people. A lot of his policies kind of in the abstract seemed really. popular. There was a lot of concern about how kind of, quote, the tariffs were going to play. When he walked into office for Term 2, things were going pretty good. And since then, that has

pretty rapidly reversed on a number of fronts. For example, on the policy front, let me do policy and we'll talk about people. On the policy front, basically what we're seeing is that as soon as Trump actually does something that he says he's going to do, people don't like the way that that is happening. So there was kind of this hardcore of voters who were pretty confident, that tariffs were either going to not impact prices or bring prices down. Those same voters, if you go and ask them again, now realize that they were wrong and that tariffs are having a negative impact on their pocketbook. Tariffs still remain overall.

People are kind of narrowly against them. It's sort of like there's a hardcore of Trump supporters that will always be for them, but those numbers have come down a few points over time. A more sort of precipitous case of that is with the story of Doge, which currently is out of news because I guess, you know, once Elon is no longer involved in a public capacity, becomes less newsworthy. But we should keep in mind that Doge still exists and is still doing things. And at the start of Trump's term, the mere promise of having a Department of Government efficiency seemed like a pretty cool idea to a lot of people. And then the way that he's done that

has basically tanked not only support for Doge, which went from, you know, a pretty strongly positive idea in theory to an overwhelmingly negatively viewed idea in practice. Indeed, it's actually underwater even below Trump right now. But also, as that's kind of going on, the actual cuts that it's recommending, some of them, we need to be honest, actually are kind of okay by the public. I think the public is less supportive, for example, of USAID than sort of people in kind of the DC universe. But the cuts that are recommended to the things that we're seeing in the budget, which I'm sure we'll get to, are really unpopular. And also just on its face, the fact that you have this weird ketamine-addled billionaire who cannot be held accountable implementing

these cuts, people really hated that and they turned against it pretty quickly. Doge right now is viewed pretty negatively across the board outside of kind of the maga diehard. And also Elon Musk's numbers themselves have taken a pretty precipitous hit. And that decline has continued even after he moved out of the public spotlight. Along with those, Trump has gone from squarely kind of like, you know, right around a kind of a tie. and sort of people's views to now is, is in fact underwater. And on that front, I think the most key thing, the most important thing that we're seeing

is that the Republican Party is breaking on its strongest issue, which is immigration. You've seen quite a bit of this in public polling on this question. It varies a little bit whether we're talking about immigration or strength on the border or deportations. But overall, what you're seeing out there in the public is matching what we're seeing in the work they were doing on a day-to-day basis. Trump is currently squarely underwater on the issue of immigration, which is one of the problems, one of the issues that probably brought him back into the White House in the first place. Additionally, people remain sort of really pessimistic about the state of inflation. They don't feel Trump has done anything to address inflation or

the cost of living. As we know, that combined with immigration, very likely are the issues that brought Trump over the top in the first place. So people like what they hear, but they don't like what they see. Right. So what we need to keep in mind here is that Trump sort of pitched a lot of kind of popular goals to people. People really like the idea of having a leaner, more efficient government. People like the idea of our laws being enforced within our borders. People like the idea of having an orderly immigration system. So the outcome that Trump shares with people, they actually find pretty appealing. And then the problem is that once that's happening in practice, we need to keep in mind that people do continue to sort of share the overall objective, but the implementation

is going pretty poorly across the board. The story of how that's happening on the budget, I think we have seen before historically. People like smaller government, but they hate what it takes to get them there. The immigration story, I would say, is somewhat unprecedented in Trump's time in politics, where the sheer sort of nature of what he's actually doing,

I think it's caught so many people off guard, that it's caught people sort of off guard with how extreme it was going to be. And so one of the net effects of that is if you look at the type of voter, I'll be to pivot over from policies to people real quick, is that if you look at the type of voter that Trump picked up in 2024, for example, you're thinking young voters, young men in particular, you know, Latino men under the age of 45, black men are under the age of 45.

There's pretty clear evidence that Trump picked up considerable segments of those populations. those groups are now turning against him to a sort of statistically detectable degree, particularly among young men. I just finished fielding a survey with the Young Men of the Strutsch Initiative that was a sample of a thousand young men. That data is now online, happy to plug as necessary. But we're now finding that Trump has now lost kind of enough of those young men to basically erase almost all of the progress that he's made over the past few years. So those kind of swing audiences that he captured in 2024, in particular, are melting away from him pretty quickly. That's interesting because I remember a couple years ago, you know, we were being told that millennials and even Gen Z were not getting more conservative as they got older. And then all of the sudden, and that was like the first time in a few generations that, you know, people weren't getting conservative as they got older.

And then all of a sudden it felt like there was a snap. and people were like, okay, now Trump is really a threat with Gen Z and millennials. Do you feel like he still is a threat? One, that's my first question. I have other follow-ups on that. Yeah. So the interesting thing here, the reason why I think Trump still is a threat in this regard is that if you look at the views that are driving people to the right, particularly young men,

this cohort of voters actually expresses some fairly troubling views. on questions of sex and gender and gender identity, the role of feminism in society, and sort of views of that nature that Trump, frankly, I think, has the capacity to sort of push that button with some facility. He's quite adept at sort of being, I'm like the man on the ballot and nobody else is. And those are often called cultural views, whatever you want to call them. I'm going to shorthand them as cultural views for the purposes of this conversation. And young men continue to hold pretty troubling views in that regard, more so than their predecessors in millennials, particularly older millennials, which I think it's something that we should keep an eye on, which means that when the time comes, there actually are messaging avenues available to Republicans to win those photos back. so it's kind of like the he-man woman haters club of the gen z he men women haters club that young men are

anti-feminist anti you know i don't even know the right words they're they have a very outdated or going back to that outdated madman view of of the world yeah there seems to there seems to be a general perception that you know for example if you ask young men you know what you're sort of top concerns in your day-to-day sort of life. One of their top concerns is literally like, if I express the wrong opinion online, I'm going to be canceled by women, for example. And these same young men will say things like they will express skepticism of trans rights, for example. Plenty of young men will even express skepticism of ideas like are, you know, can gay men be manly, for example? I think that type of view, again, the sort of very

troubling and kind of basic stuff in many ways is a set of view. that young men are increasingly kind of kind of kind of voting on this sort of drift leading them to the to the right got it all right well it's good news though that the numbers are coming down it's not it's maybe not all good news because it's not like it's a solidified coming down seems like maybe for still a significant portion of the population the day-to-day expenses outrank their podcast bros and that's having some impact. So that's good news.

What other good news do you see out there? I mean, one of the things that I think of is it does seem like the public demonstrations around the No King's effort is impacting public opinion. Yeah. And so on a lot of that, I think what we need to remember is that the public does have kind of a sense of when things go too far, when things are sort of too extreme. So Trump's numbers on this question were actually starting to. come down, you know, by the time that he deployed Marines to Los Angeles, for example,

there's been some consternation in the public about how sort of that initial round of reaction kind of, like, quote, unquote, played in public opinion. But the fact of the matter is that when Trump began deploying U.S. troops to U.S. cities, people didn't like that, and his numbers began coming down on, you know, phrase it as immigration or as deportation. And then by the time of the No King's protests, one, which I would say were wildly. successful. It was very clear that they were able to mobilize a large number of people in just a shocking number of communities. I think we've all seen, you know, here's my, oh, my God, my parents' hometown is a couple thousand people, and here's this line of folks besides. I think

the imagery that came out of those protests was extremely kind of positive and effective, the sheer sort of diversity and range of people who were annoyed of what they were seeing, the clarity of the message. I know there was some worry for some people that, you know, does the idea. of like no kings, or some people's heads, it does not look like that concern to play out in practice. These protests were extremely effective and it's clear had a role, one, in bringing down Trump's numbers on issues like immigration, but two, also showing that there is a popular front against his extremism. And I encourage people to think really hard about, you know, now that we can all kind of look around and see how many of our neighbors are upset by what's going on,

how many people do believe Trump is going too far? How can we keep that momentum going once the protest is over and we bring our signs home and hang them up for further for the next one? So the key here is that people don't want to feel like they're the only ones that think the way that they think and that the more that we can show people that they're not alone, that they're safety in numbers, that it's, you know, effective to speak out peacefully and publicly, the more that we can kind of recruit people to our cause. And maybe they don't all show up to our events, but they at least know, hey, there's a bunch of people in my community that aren't happy with the way things are going. And that maybe gives people the social permission to start rethinking some of the things that they're hearing from Fox News and Donald Trump. Yeah. And I know, you know, you and I have seen a lot of this in our past working kind of working with rural area voters as well, where it's so common to hear people. You have a conversation with them, they'll express like, oh, my God, I literally thought I was the only demonstration.

Democrat in this county. And I think being able to show people that, hey, you know, like the, like, deploying the, like, deploying the Marines to Los Angeles, like, yes, it is crazy. Like, you're allowed, like, you're allowed to think that. Um, like, watching these, like, incredibly painful scenes of a woman being torn out of her car with her kid in the backseat. That is really crazy. You're not, you're not a lunatic for thinking that this is going way too far. You know, whether that's kind of giving permission, of us giving people kind of acknowledgment, giving them room to sort of process what they're, what they're seeing. To me, it's very clear that being able to show that this is kind of everybody, you know, the protests that we saw were across the country. They were not limited to a few cities. They were not, you know, cooks who were setting fires to cars or whatever. This really was kind of everybody. I think that does give people's brains permission, as you would put it, in some really important ways. Yeah, not to overly plug, you know, Trey's shows, but one the reason why I like going to trade shows when he's coming through town is because all the

people that show up all say the same thing, which is, oh my God, I thought I was the only one who thought this way, especially when you're in more of the rural and red areas where he's touring through. So I think that dynamic is really important. I think anybody that is, you know, grew up in a small town or grew up in the south or grew up in the red states can really relate to that fact of like you're so used to being the only one or feeling like you're the only one who thinks a little bit differently than everybody else, especially on things like Donald Trump, that it can be really refreshing to know you're not alone. So I think for all of those folks who got out there and did the No King's events and are looking at other events in their community, I think it's

worth their time. And I think, you know, it's one little piece at a time, but I think we are seeing things pay off. John, thanks so much for joining us on good skews. Where can people find more information about you or follow your work? Easiest way to just keep touch with me. I can follow me on Blue Sky at J-L-R-A-Y or on Twitter at John L. Ray. I post there fairly often. I would encourage people for the survey research that were talking about earlier to check out the Young Men of Research Initiative Substack. You can just Google it. It'll come right up. That's the easiest way to follow me. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And thanks everybody for tuning in to

good skews. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Matt. All right.