‘Trump Has Profound Problems’: Nate Silver Warns of Major New Polling Low for President

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

President Donald Trump’s approval rating dropped to its lowest-ever second term mark in Nate Silver’s tracking, the pollster reported on Monday.

The president has had negative poll results throughout his second term. An April 2025 Pew Research Center survey found him underwater with all demographic groups except Republicans and self-identified Trump voters and on all issues that were polled, including the economy, immigration, health care, trade, and foreign policy. A YouGov poll last month found a clear majority of Americans blaming Trump’s tariffs for higher prices and cheering the Supreme Court decision that struck them down.

The latest updates to Silver’s ongoing poll tracking showed “Trump’s numbers keep trending down,” he reported, with the president’s approval rating falling below 40 percent for the first time in his second term, and hitting “a new low.”

It was not just one factor that was dragging Trump down, Silver added, and the president now has “profound problems,” even with his base MAGA voters.

“Obviously, gas prices are a big factor,” wrote Silver, and Trump was now showing “signs of erosion among his base.”

“Only 22% of Americans have a *strongly* favorable view of Trump,” he continued. “2028 aspirants are starting to pull away from him. One wonders about the effect of his age, too.”

In the latest issue of Silver’s newsletter, he elaborated on what was contributing to Trump’s polling struggles, pointing out that Trump had seen a “remarkably linear” decline in his approval ratings, with “peaks and valleys” that “correlate with particular news events,” like the imposition of his tariffs, the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis, the shutdown over DHS funding, and start of the Iran War.

After Trump’s numbers took hits after these events, wrote Silver, his numbers have climbed back up, “[b]ut the recovery after every bounce-back has been incomplete, leaving some permanent damage behind.”

“Trump just hit a new low in our tracking,” wrote Silver. “For the first time in his second term, Trump’s approval rating in our average is (just barely) below 40 percent at 39.7. And his net approval rating is -17.4, also a new low. The recent decline has been pretty steep: about 5 points of net approval over the past several weeks.”

Silver noted that “just about the only issues where Trump’s ratings remain close to breakeven” are immigration and border security, but ICE’s tactics have been “deeply unpopular with swing voters,” specifically the shootings of Good and Pretti.

The Iran War “has had a much clearer impact,” Silver wrote, because of “the impact on gas prices, which are now at about $4 nationally, having risen by more than a dollar over the past month.”

There was no “traditional rally-around-the-flag effect” with the Iran War, and it was noticeably more unpopular than other U.S. military actions, but it was “no more unpopular than Trump himself.”

The damage to Trump’s approval ratings traces to “about a week into the war when markets started to freak out over the likelihood of a prolonged disruption to oil shipments in the Persian Gulf,” wrote Silver, sharing a graph from GasBuddy data.

Screenshot via natesilver.net.

The gas prices are now well above any other point in Trump’s second term so far — or the last few months of the 2024 election cycle, which was heavily influenced by voters’ concerns about inflation and other economic issues:

Gas prices are likely to a sore point for a president who an election largely on inflation. In 2024, 40 percent of voters in the exit poll said that “high prices for gas, groceries and other goods” was the single most important factor deciding their vote, and they broke 2:1 for Trump. It would be hard to pick a more visible indicator of affordability.

“It’s when people’s pocketbooks are affected or their daily lives are disrupted that broader public opinion tends to change,” wrote Silver, describing people checking their 401(k) accounts and finding their investments have “declined by a chunk” or the Trump administration threatening to cut off food stamp benefits.

What struck Silver about Trump’s low numbers was how “so many of these political wounds have been self-inflicted,” he wrote, especially how the “biggest economic shocks have also been Trump-caused: the tariffs last year, and now the oil shock.”

Read Silver’s full analysis here.

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