A Crack in the Polling Floor Puts Trump in New Territory
Over the last decade, it’s often been said that President Trump’s support has a low ceiling but a high floor. In this morning’s latest New York Times/Siena poll, whether Mr. Trump really has a high floor is starting to be put to the test. Just 37 percent of Americans approve of his performance as president, a drop of four percentage points from the last Times/Siena poll in January and his lowest approval rating in any Times/Siena survey in either term. A four-point decline isn’t necessarily huge, but it puts Mr. Trump’s ratings in new political territory. While recent presidencies have often been unpopular and polarizing, no president’s approval rating has been under 38 percent for more than a few days in the last 17 years, according to our average. If there has been a floor during this partisan era of politics, Mr. Trump’s ratings today have fallen to it. While it’s too soon to say whether the war in Iran and high gas prices will ultimately break the floor in Mr. Trump’s support, the poll leaves no doubt that these issues could pull his approval ratings down even lower. Just 28 percent of voters approve of his handling of the cost of living, and only 31 percent approve of his handling of the war. Just 30 percent say he made the “right decision” in choosing to attack Iran. The most immediate political consequence is that Democrats appear increasingly well positioned for the midterm elections in November. The poll shows Democrats have a double-digit lead, 50 percent to 39 percent, when registered voters are asked which party’s candidate they’ll support for Congress. That’s a notable shift from Times/Siena polls earlier this cycle — which showed Democrats up two to five points. Anything like it would easily overcome the Republicans’ redistricting advantage in the House and suggest that Democrats could be highly competitive in the Senate. And although there’s still a long time until the election, Democrats held an even larger 14-point lead among those who said they were “almost certain” or “very likely” to vote. As in other recent Times/Siena polls, the survey found that young and nonwhite voters have snapped back toward the left. Democrats have regained their usual, pre-Biden advantage among both groups in the race for control of Congress as well as in party identification. Mr. Trump’s approval rating among both groups is abysmal: Among voters 18 to 29 years old, only 19 percent approve of his performance; just 20 percent of Hispanic voters say the same. The possibility that Mr. Trump’s floor is cracking raises the prospect of even more significant, longer-term political consequences. If the war and high prices persist, Mr. Trump’s troubles could start to look less like other recent polarizing presidencies and more like those of George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman, in which quagmire abroad and economic challenges at home did significant political damage to their parties. Of course, Iran is not doomed to be another Iraq, Vietnam or Korea. For now, there’s a cease-fire; there could be a diplomatic solution at any time. If prior wars are any indication, Mr. Trump has time to resolve these challenges before his approval ratings fall into the lower 30s or beyond. The case of George W. Bush is instructive. At almost the exact same stage of Mr. Bush’s second term, the combination of the war in Iraq and high gas prices dragged his approval rating to about where Mr. Trump’s ratings are today. His ratings ultimately fell into the 20s, but it didn’t happen overnight. On average, Mr. Bush’s approval rating fell by less than one point per month for the rest of his term — which so happens to be the rate that Mr. Trump has been losing support over the last few months. For his approval rating to keep falling, Mr. Bush had to lose the support of longtime fans and Republicans. It can take a while. If the conflict lasts long enough for Mr. Trump to keep bleeding support, Republicans might face something a lot worse than a bad midterm. A midterm defeat was likely even before the war began — it’s the usual fate of parties in power, after all — but the president’s party usually rebounds relative to that for the next presidential election. If Mr. Trump’s approval rating stays in the 30s, it won’t be so easy to assume Republicans will rebound. In the polling era, there are no examples of the president’s party retaining the White House when the president’s approval rating is under 40 percent. More often, the election is a rout. You can read the full story on the poll results regarding Mr. Trump, Iran and the midterms here. Method change: Introducing “synthetic past vote” (wonky 8/10)Over the next few surveys, we’re going to introduce a series of methodological changes to the Times/Siena poll. Together, they represent the biggest changes to the survey since it began in 2016. We’ll be introducing more of these changes in future polls, but we’ve implemented one initial change for this survey. It’s a new target for “weighting,” a term for the statistical adjustment used by pollsters to ensure that a poll’s sample looks like the population it’s trying to measure. If it had been implemented for prior pre-election surveys, it would have modestly but materially improved the accuracy of those surveys. We’re calling this measure “synthetic past vote” (suggestions welcome). It’s a measure derived from the so-called “recall vote” question, which asks people whether they voted and for whom in the last presidential election. As longtime Tilt readers know, pollsters have increasingly been using “recall vote” to weight their polls. If, for example, a pollster found more voters who say they supported Kamala Harris than Donald Trump in 2024, they would weight the poll such that the proportion of self-reported Trump and Harris voters matched the actual result of the last election. Before the Trump era, weighting on “recall vote” had been frowned upon. Pollsters increasingly weight on it anyway; for many, it is the only way to counteract the tendency for polls to systematically underestimate Mr. Trump’s support. The Times/Siena poll is one of the few remaining pollsters not weighting on recall vote. Our polls have tended to underestimate Mr. Trump as well, but weighting on recall vote would not have helped. Synthetic past vote attempts to address the issues that have deterred us from using recall vote. By perhaps the most important measure, it mitigates those problems: Unlike with recall vote, Times/Siena polls would have been more accurate in recent elections if they had been weighted by synthetic past vote. It’s important to emphasize that synthetic past vote affects only how respondents are weighted; it does not replace or alter the results of the “recall vote” question. When you look at the results of the Times/Siena poll, you will still see the results of the recall vote question as respondents answered it. Synthetic past vote differs from recall vote in three basic respects. Imputation. Synthetic past vote uses the imputed presidential vote choice of validated voters who did not tell us whom they supported in the last election. Surprisingly, around 15 percent of voters who do have a record of voting in the last election don’t tell us which of the two major party candidates they supported — whether because they say they voted for “someone else,” say they didn’t vote (even though they did), or simply refused to answer altogether. The large number of validated voters without a major party preference creates a lot of potential for recall vote weighting to go awry. If one party’s voters are more or less likely to state whom they supported in the last election, weighting on recall vote can skew the poll as a whole. In particular, there’s a tendency for the supporters of the winner of the last election to be likelier to recall whom they supported, which historically would bias the results of polls using recall vote. To mitigate these issues, we make a best guess for how these voters actually voted in the last election, based on their political and demographic characteristics. Validation. Synthetic past vote treats any respondent without a validated record of voting as a nonvoter, regardless of whether they say they voted in the last election. Surprisingly again, around half of survey respondents who did not vote in the last election, based on voter records, tell us that they did. This creates a number of issues, both practical and in principle, for recall vote weighting as traditionally implemented. To address it, synthetic past vote treats validated nonvoters as such, even if they say they voted. Modeled targets. Synthetic past vote is weighted to match our estimate for how today’s registered voters (with a record of voting) voted in the last election. This is different from the typical way public pollsters weight on recall vote, which usually weights the sample to match the actual result of the last election. While this could work under some circumstances, it’s clear that the makeup of the registered voters or the actual electorate can change significantly from one election to the next, whether because people move, die, are removed from the rolls or simply choose to stay home. Synthetic past vote tries to account for these changes. How much do these three differences matter? They can matter a lot. Overall, 20 percent of respondents are classified differently by synthetic vote than recall vote. For good measure, the modeled target can be quite different from the result of the last election. To put a finer point on this: Weighting on synthetic past vote can and will yield very different findings on the recall vote question than the result of the last election. To take one example, if we had weighted our Florida poll from October 2024 by synthetic past vote, it would have shown that respondents reported voting for Mr. Trump by nine points in the 2020 election, compared with his actual three-point victory. The difference was partly because Florida’s likely electorate had shifted toward the right, according to our estimates at the time, and partly because a lopsided number of voters without a record of participating in the 2020 election claimed to have supported Mr. Trump. I suspect these kinds of differences will raise confusion and debate at some point in the future, but fortunately there’s no such disparity in today’s poll: It’s Trump +1 by recall vote. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Send me a note at dear.upshot@nytimes.com.
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