Trump is “Teflon Don” no more
Plus, price anxiety and anti-incumbent bias are worse than in 2024. Your weekly political data roundup for August 9, 2026.
This is my weekly Sunday roundup of new political data published over the last seven days. It is free to read, but if you want to support independent data-driven political journalism, become a paying subscriber and get additional data journalism and premium analysis at least once weekly.
Dear readers,
Before the roundup, I wanted to share two long interviews from this week that you may be interested in. First, a conversation with Paul Krugman about the midterms, in which I argue that people are updating their priors about November far too slowly. It looks like a big blue wave. A House majority bigger than the one Democrats won in 2018 is in reach, and full control of Congress is just past even odds.
Second, I was back on WNYC’s On the Media for a wide-ranging interview this Friday, talking about the latest polling on Trump and immigration, the Michigan primary, the new forecast at FiftyPlusOne, and what role public opinion ought to play in a democracy. The link to that is here.
And with that…
Leading off: I revisit the polling on the war in Iran. A lot of smart people still think Donald Trump is escaping public accountability for it, but the data says otherwise. He’s doing even worse than Joe Biden after botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
On deck this week: Tuesday’s Deep Dive is about why Trump’s numbers on the economy are so sour. It’s not just that conditions are poor, but also that voters see him as prioritizing the wrong issues.
Plus: Data about price anxiety in 2024, and the true costs of mass deportations.
Thank you for reading Strength In Numbers for another week!
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1. Iran is worse for Trump than Afghanistan was for Biden
Pollster Kevin Collins argued Friday afternoon against a sentiment he keeps running into, and that we’ve dealt with here at SIN a number of times — that the public has given President Donald Trump a comparative pass on a wildly right-wing presidency. Specifically, Collins calls out the below post:
“perhaps [that] is an accurate reflection of media coverage,” Collins wrote. “But I don’t think it captures public opinion accurately, which has indeed been savaging Trump.”
He’s right, and the data is quite clear here. Collins notes that Echelon Insights, a Republican firm (I think their newest data just came out, thats why Collins used it) has found Trump 24 points underwater on foreign policy, for instance — actually below Joe Biden’s -10 at this point in his term:
Now it’s true that Biden had a worse rating for handling the Afghanistan situation that he did overall; Quinnipiac had Biden at 31% approve vs 65% disapproval on his handling of the withdrawal itself. So the eighteen-month comparison above is kinda the best case.
But if you look at polls of Trump’s handling of Iran, the public is even more bleak. According to the average I run for FiftyPlusOne (right now on the SIN data portal, moving to the polls site soon), Trump’s approval for handling Iran is -30 today. The graph below shows Trump’s approval overall, on foreign policy in general, and Iran in particular over the last 18 months:
But what’s also different about Iran is how how little support there is for the president’s goals. By and large Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was popular, it’s the execution of the withdrawal that dragged Biden down. Pew found 54% of Americans said leaving Afghanistan was the right callagainst 42% who said it was wrong, even as roughly seven in ten rated the administration’s handling of the exit only fair or poor.
Iran is not an analogous case. In a poll back in March, Pew found 59% of Americans said striking Iran was the wrong decision, vs 38% who said it was right. Just 37% approved of Trump’s handling of the conflict; and 61% disapproved. Unlike for Biden, where the public was aligned with his goals, Trump’s in the position of having both his policy and execution disapproved of simultaneously.
And it has gotten worse for Trump since March. In July, Quinnipiac pegged Trump’s approval on Iran at 28% against 66% disapproval, and foreign policy at 34% against 62%. His overall job approval in that poll was 32% — the lowest Quinnipiac has ever measured for him.
Update your priors about Trump
Back in September 2025, after ABC/Disney pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air when FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened the licenses of the stations that carried it, I made the argument that “powerful people” (network executives, CEOs, donors, celebrities) systematically overestimate how popular the president is and how much mass support there is for his agenda. From my experience I see even an overestimation of the incidence of cultural MAG thinking in the population.
Trump won about half of the votes cast in 2024. That is only about a third of American adults. Accounting for defections and disaffection, maybe 15-20% of the population is fully on board with super MAGA stuff like shutting down ABC-owned news affiliates.
After an outpouring of support for Kimmel, he was back on the air in six days. ABC/Disney, to its credit, appears to have revisited Trump’s numbers. In early May, it told the FCC in a 52-page filing that the agency was violating Disney’s First Amendment rights by ordering an ABC station to relitigate a 24-year-old exemption for “The View” under the equal-time rules. Then, it filed its station license renewals under protest, calling the order behind them “unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional.”
On July 29, ABC asked the FCC to throw out the petitions against its stations, pointing to more than 150,000 public comments made in favor of the new organization.
So chalk one up in the win column. A company updated its estimate of public opinion, and acted differently when it found out the public was on its side.
Still, not all commentary has caught up to the data. There is still an implicit impression I get when talking to many folks in the media and Washington that Trump is more popular than he seems, or not getting punished like Biden was for inflation and foreign policy.
That is not true. Trump’s numbers are historically bad — not for any one big thing he did wrong, but many small ones that each marginalize additional Americans. He is deeply, deeply unpopular. Update your priors accordingly!
2. What Strength In Numbers published last week
Last Sunday’s roundup was about how Trump’s deportation agenda is underwater in every swing state, and why it looks like some Republicans in Congress have started to notice:
On Monday, our sister publication FiftyPlusOne launched its 2026 congressional election forecast, which puts Democrats above even odds in both chambers. Crossposted here:
Tuesday’s Deep Dive dug into the two groups — Trump’s 2024 voters and pure independents — who are dragging down the president to his current 36% approval and 61% disapproval in our average, a net -25 and a record low.
On Thursday, I argued that the confident takes about how new Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is a weaker general-election candidate (as usual with his brand of story) very thin on data:
Also Thursday, David Nir and I opened the hood on the election model and worked through what went wrong with the Michigan primary polls:
And on Friday, new numbers on the divide inside the Democratic coalition — anti-system voters rate Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez higher than mainstream Democrats even after controlling for age and ideology:
If you’re a frequent reader of Strength In Numbers, I’m confident you will get a lot of value out of a paid subscription. You’ll get access to all of my Tuesday Deep Dives, monthly polling data, our private community of election nerds on Discord, and more.
3. Even more numbers!
he Economic Policy Institute built a calculator for what mass deportation costs you personally. The answer is $2,358 per taxpayer, or $268.9 billion across fiscal 2025 through 2029 — enough, for example, to cover SNAP for another 118 million recipients over the rest of Trump’s term. Trump deportations cost taxpayers $2,358 each
Ruth Igielnik explains why Michigan’s primary polls were so far off El-Sayed’s actual one-point win. Most surveys assumed independents would be 30-40% of a Democratic primary electorate, and only one poll in the final month came from a select pollster. Why Polling Overestimated Abdul El-Sayed’s Advantage in Michigan
Pew has a piece out charting Trump’s approval alongside every modern president in their first term. He’s last, 3 points below Biden in 2022 and 6 below his own first-term number. Republican approval is cracking too, down to 69% from 84% in February 2025. Trump’s job approval rating is low by historical standards
Mary Radcliffe and Cooper Burton write about how Americans are more anxious about prices than they were in 2024
And that’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. Strength In Numbers will be back in your inbox on Tuesday.
Got more for next week? Email your links or add to the comments below! Comments are now UNLOCKED on the Sunday roundup.
Imagine if corporate media for even one second held the Rep party to the same standard it applies to Dems. Or any standard...
"Trump won about half of the votes cast in 2024. That is only about a third of American adults. Accounting for defections and disaffection, maybe 15-20% of the population is fully on board with super MAGA stuff like shutting down ABC-owned news affiliates."
It is important to remember how vigorously the right-wind media universe tries to prop up the myth that Trump is invincible. In fact, MAGA is shrinking, not growing.
"Regular" (such as they are) Republicans are repelled by his endless lying, corruption, and abuse of his power. Hopefully they will either stay home or summon the courage to vote against their spineless, toadying representatives this fall.
The only question remaining is whether Trump's plots to interfere in the elections (gerrymandering, stacking state election boards with buddies from 2020, planting ICE agents at the polls to incite protests, etc.) will affect the mid-term outcomes.
As I keep saying, we need a Hungarian-style tsunami to make it crystal clear that Trump and Trumpism are on the way OUT.