Independents and 2024 non-voters have swung back left
The big story in the new NYT/Siena poll isn't Trump's 37% approval (although that's very bad) — it's a 24-point swing among persuadable voters
I received six emails from major news outlets on Monday asking me to comment on Donald Trump’s 37% job approval (59% disapproval) rating in the new New York Times/Siena University poll out yesterday. This is an unusually high level of interest in one poll for my inbox, so I logged into my social media accounts to see how it was getting covered. Practically every post on my various timelines (algorithmically curated and otherwise) was about Trump’s new worst-ever NYT poll. It was a feeding frenzy.
Here are a couple thoughts about this poll, and then a big story to dig into with you all:
Here at Strength In Numbers we are, of course, delighted with coverage of polling that serves the unique small-”d” democratic purpose of offering a check on the party in power between elections. As the data below show, this is not a presidency for working-class people, and covering public opinion polls is one way to advocate for the people.
And PS, the NYT poll also happened to land basically exactly on top of our current average at FiftyPlusOne.news. It was obvious to some of us some time ago that Trump was historically unpopular in a way that would hurt his party — even while pundits have been arguing otherwise:
The Democrats also posted an 11-point margin among registered voters in the NYT poll’s “generic ballot” question, which measures support for U.S. House candidates across the country. That matches our January–February Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls. Our May poll comes out next week.
But the result that should really cause you to update your beliefs about this year’s midterms is not in the topline or the Times’ official reporting, but hidden deep in the poll’s crosstabs.
A big story of the 2024 election was that Donald Trump made inroads with non-voters who traditionally leaned Democratic, and even got some of them to turn out for him. But now it’s looking like he has squandered those gains and put his party on the path to midterm defeat in the House — and possibly the Senate.
In this week’s Deep Dive, we look at how the least politically engaged Americans are feeling about Trump, the midterms, and the broader political and economic environment of the United States right now. Are the Americans who put Trump in the White House now set to give his party a historical thumping in November? Let’s boot up the data.
