And what does that even mean? Also this week: Shutdown polls; Left-wing populism; Low favorability ratings for all U.S. leaders; Judges' concerns about Trump; + more!
Trump and his voters have at least one thing in common: They are all idiots. G. Elliot Morris says that inflation is the reason Trump won the election. I would state that differently. Inflation is the issue on which the Trump victory rested, but the REASON he won is because the American electorate is dominated by disengaged, poorly informed, quite ignorant, and often not very bright voters. The short version: Trump won because of stupid, ignorant, and poorly informed voters. And is what worries me most about the future -- that and the SCOTUS majority. Voters can get upset about the price of eggs and turn against Trump for that reason, but that doesn't mean they are any smarter or better informed or that they ever will be, since that takes more than being able to read grocery store (and gas station) receipts and bank statements. It doesn't stop voters from mindlessly taking the word of the worst and most prolific liar in US political history that he will do something, when an entire universe of evidence to the contrary exists and is readily available and either ignored or never accessed. Wishful thinking is a poor basis for choosing a candidate.
Trump voters fall into various sub-categories under the heading IDIOTS. Here are some of the sub-categories. There are the true believers. For many of them, if they had a complaint about Trump in October 2025, it would be that he hasn't been cruel enough, hasn't broken the law enough, hasn't ignored the Constitution enough, and hasn't put enough blue cities under completely absurd and unnecessary "military rule." We wouldn't expect much change in their approval of their fascist idol.
There are the low-information voters -- yeah, most of the people who vote for Trump qualify as low-information voters if the information we're considering is accurate, truthful information. Lots of his true believers have lots of information, but it is primarily lies, fantasies, wishful thinking, and conspiracy theories. So, maybe they should be considered high, low-quality information voters who don't fit in this category, which is for people who aren't engaged and don't pay much attention to politics. They may know that eggs cost more than they did, but they haven't a clue as to why that is, what causes inflation, or who is responsible for it. In other words, in keeping with their status as idiots, they are voting for things they don't really understand and because of that they have no idea what it will take to fix a problem such as inflation or who is best qualified to do so. Their response was to believe the most notorious liar in American political history and to rely on him to fulfill a promise that made no sense at all -- lowering prices "on day one" -- and for which he had extremely limited, if any, ability to honor. And absolutely no intention to do so. That's what all the talk about tariffs was about. They are primarily taxes on consumers and will raise prices not lower them. Would Trump lower the price of gasoline, which, in the interests of reducing miles driven by internal combustion engine drivers and so reduce our carbon footprint in a time of dangerous climate change? No. The American president has little impact on the price of a barrel of oil, which is set internationally. No problem, if you're going to believe on stupid thing, why not two, or ten, or everything a dumb, ignorant liar says.
Next up are the voters who may have switched from voting for Democrats to Republicans because of Joe Biden's catastrophic moral and political blunder to aid and abet Israel in committing war crimes and genocide against Palestinians. Those voters were right in being outraged by Biden's decisions and his failure, once the impact was visible for the whole world to see, to withdraw support and demand that Israel cease and desist. However, voting for a fascist was not a sensible response. There was no reason to believe that the Palestinian people would get better treatment by Trump and every reason to believe they would fare worse. Trump now dreams of depopulating Gaza -- sending Palestinians somewhere -- and turning the area into, what, a Trump-branded resort. I admit, that wasn't something even very engaged and well-informed voters would have imagined in 2024, but neither would they have believed that Trump would be good for Palestinians. Even if one gives Trump credit for the cease fire plan, that doesn't mean what comes next for Palestinians will be good. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Whose left? Of course there are the amazing long-time Republicans who either don't realize what their party has become or don't care, since they just hate Democrats. Their goal is a Democrat-free government and anyone carrying the Republican banner is OK with them. That doesn't require any thought at all, just reliance on old habits and well-established bigotry.
Not only was the decision voters made in choosing Trump a fantastically stupid and ignorant one, but it was one that has already caused far more deaths than what has happened in Gaza. Trump/Musk?Doge's decision to kill USAID has already been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Africa and in countries who needed US aid to prevent the deaths, often of young children. They are history now, but the death toll will continue to rise. Trump's appointment of RFK Jr. will ultimately result in countless more unnecessary deaths caused by anti-vax mentality and the gutting of an extraordinary amount of funding for scientific and medical research. As yet unknown is how many deaths may result from the installation of unfit and unqualified people in positions such as Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth) and DNI (Tulsi Gabbard). Neither of those two is in any way competent to do the jobs Trump has given them. None of Trump's ridiculous appointments can be considered surprising, since even in his first term he proved himself to be the world's worst judge of character, talent, and competence. One Buffoon-in-Chief picking other assistant buffoons.
While Enten seems to have selected data to make a more interesting claim for TV, I do think it’s relevant that Trump is slightly (but consistently) more popular than he was in his first term and despite almost universally bad results & images (jobs down, prices up, tariff uncertainty, masked ICE agents arresting regular people, losses in court cases, no Doge savings, national guard troops in cities) neither Trump nor Congressional Republicans have lost much support. As inflation was the most important issue in 2024 according to most pollsters, I expected that Trump would lose more support already. Basically that he would be at this first term low point in most polls.
Thanks for a clear explanation. While I have not watched CNN, and I try to avoid hearing the Pep Secretary's pronouncements (It blows my mind that American taxpayers pay her salary, which I'm sure is ongoing during the shutdown), I would probably come across this information and wonder where the heck they got those numbers. Now I know: They ignored evidence!
I've never watched cable news. I am old enough to recall when suddenly it was being showed on all the TV screens in airports. I called it "compulsory CNN." I quickly noted the repetitiveness in spite of the effort to make it sound like news was breaking any moment. To be fair, when the networks would jump on a story as breaking news, the anchors and others would drone on, even though there was no information yet. And then there was the attempt to find "human interest" just to keep the story going. (Example, someone who knew the suspect in elementary school.) I also disliked the advertisements on cable and non-cable TV, none of which ever influenced me to buy their products, once I aged out of Saturday morning cartoons.
I've never been on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Substack is my first venture, and, so far, it has been positive, as I decide to what I wish to subscribe, and there are no ads.
I do survey design and analysis as part of my work as a research scientist at a major university. I think your comment about the polling question Enten presented (Is Trump doing what he promised?) relates well to your October 7th article regarding the wording of questions. If this question was part of a scale, I suspect that it would show poor reliability and get dropped through factor analysis.
If a survey asked me if trump was doing as expected, as he promised, I’d say, yup, he is. trump hasn’t changed. He was obvious from the start. No surprises here. It boggled my mind that anyone could stand him before. It boggles my mind that his approval numbers are still above what we used to call the lunatic fringe of ~20%. If the survey question asks if I approve of his performance, my unchanged answer is clearly no. But if a survey asks if he’s doing what he said he would do, my answer has to be, yes, and faster than expected. Which means he’s got quite a team behind him.
Questions on the new site... will all the charts from here eventually get moved over? I'm not particularly interested in individual polls since deep dives into the data isn't what I'm after. The summaries shown on the charts I like. As someone who has lived in various states over the years, I like the map showing approval by state. Will it move over or disappear? I enjoy reading your page for just the reason I avoid TV news analysis with its cherry picking. Thanks for all your hard work.
absolutely love your stuff! This one in particular is fabulous for me in revealing how the manipulation of words gets you a totally different meaning and from my perspective highlights America's gift to the world "MARKETING"!!
I saw that segment from CNN shown on Fox News show The Five. I literally yelled back at the TV, "Of course he's doing what he said he'd do!". DJT's more traditionally GOP supporters were always trying to assure the American public the positions he expressed were just hyperbole. " Don't listen to what he says, watch what he does.". Hmmm.
BTW, your posts are great. I wish more people could be made aware of the way polling and data reporting can be manipulated.
Cable news is in it's death throes meaning those who consume it die everyday. I get my news and information from places like Strength In Numbers, thoughtful well thought out arguments and insightful thinking. I know I'm not in the majority but I'm thankful places like this exist so I can keep my sanity.
Looking at the crosstabs on that CBS poll from last week, it also seems as though the "doing what he promised" question is kind of a partisan mirror - D 29/71, I 47/53, R 82/18. Given that I'd assume more than 30% of Democrats truly are not surprised by what he's done, I wonder if this question is vague enough that it just becomes "Yes = good for Trump, No = bad for Trump" and it breaks out that way.
If you assume people are giving answers that reflect thoughtful opinion and not partisan bias, the through-lines on these crosstabs get funny. On the economic better/worse/same question, Democrats are 3/83/14, which put together with the prior answer suggests that Democrats feel Trump has made them worse-off economically... and that has surprised them, since they expected him to do the opposite? Similarly, 47% of Republicans said his policies have kept things the same for them economically - a situation they hated Biden and Harris for putting them in - but they voted for him thinking he'd keep them stuck in it?
It seems to me that the "did what I expected" question doesn't carry much meaning for respondents, who treat it as just a good/bad on Trump without engaging. Meanwhile the "made my economic situation better/worse" question has some implications to it - surely, 47% of Republicans did not believe in November 2024 that Trump wouldn't improve their economic situation at all, so what does it mean that it's the best they can say for him now?
FWIW, I picked a CBS poll from last June to compare to - when asked whether Biden's policies would (not had) make them better off economically, Democrats split 37/6/57 - by this one (randomly picked, not cherry-picked) comparison, Trump is doing worse on this question with his own party now than Biden was then. Same with Independents, though by single digits. That poll also asked about what they expected for Trump - 77% of Republicans and 40% of Independents thought he'd make things better, so about half of those Rs and 2/3 of those Is have been "disappointed".
That's why he probably wouldn't win an election today, Harry.
Polls are notoriously vulnerable to GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). Choice of questions, how they’re framed and which meanings are assigned to answers, make or break validity.
Trump may not have lived up to the expectations of many republicans who thought he would improve their lives even while totally living up to the expectations of democrats who foresaw the devastation his policies would unleash on all citizens regardless of party.
Combining both sets of expectations allows
Trump’s fluffers to produce a meaningless number they choose to interpret as “Trump kept his campaign vows and his popularity was unaffected.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. But it does keep Trump and his hangers-on happy, so a win?
Americans can no longer trust cable news or legacy media, and yes it disturbs me to be saying this or sounding like an uninformed conspiracy-infused MAGA-type, but it is true. We receive nothing but deceptive, intentional misinformation about our country, immigrants, laws, government, and precious little about the rest of the world, while being truncheoned with medical ads, and lately mostly banks and investment house ads, followed by the outright lies for extended car warranties, and other dubious crap that nobody would ever actually need or benefit by.
We CAN have a massive impact if we simply start not tuning in to cable news (except BBC, Democracy Now, and PBS) and being very very vocal about boycotting their advertisers. Do not buy one thing from these swindlers. Or any MAGA/Republican owned swindlers.
I think it's important to try to watch / listen / read the news reports from all sides of the political spectrum. Most issues have legitimate arguments on both sides. (Take Obamacare subsidies: Affordability vs National Debt.) I heard there was a recent poll in which the respondents said political polarization is now the biggest problem for our country. It seems no one hears anything that doesn't reinforce their own opinions anymore.
I believe the most serious problem we have, aside from a lack of civic education, loss of community, and general obliviousness, is deception, a human trait that is the hallmark of our species. Lying. We lie to ourselves and everybody else. Almost every news cast we hear is deceptive or lacking fact or nuance. Every commercial advertisement is deceptive. Religion is deceptive and requires a lack of critical thinking and education. Lying is the problem.
It's really gotten bad since the billionaires started buying up media companies, and other media companies are keeping their head down to avoid notice.
Don't think we don't notice that your Trump Approval Rating Compared to Past Presidents graph has Trump's lines in orange.
Trump and his voters have at least one thing in common: They are all idiots. G. Elliot Morris says that inflation is the reason Trump won the election. I would state that differently. Inflation is the issue on which the Trump victory rested, but the REASON he won is because the American electorate is dominated by disengaged, poorly informed, quite ignorant, and often not very bright voters. The short version: Trump won because of stupid, ignorant, and poorly informed voters. And is what worries me most about the future -- that and the SCOTUS majority. Voters can get upset about the price of eggs and turn against Trump for that reason, but that doesn't mean they are any smarter or better informed or that they ever will be, since that takes more than being able to read grocery store (and gas station) receipts and bank statements. It doesn't stop voters from mindlessly taking the word of the worst and most prolific liar in US political history that he will do something, when an entire universe of evidence to the contrary exists and is readily available and either ignored or never accessed. Wishful thinking is a poor basis for choosing a candidate.
Trump voters fall into various sub-categories under the heading IDIOTS. Here are some of the sub-categories. There are the true believers. For many of them, if they had a complaint about Trump in October 2025, it would be that he hasn't been cruel enough, hasn't broken the law enough, hasn't ignored the Constitution enough, and hasn't put enough blue cities under completely absurd and unnecessary "military rule." We wouldn't expect much change in their approval of their fascist idol.
There are the low-information voters -- yeah, most of the people who vote for Trump qualify as low-information voters if the information we're considering is accurate, truthful information. Lots of his true believers have lots of information, but it is primarily lies, fantasies, wishful thinking, and conspiracy theories. So, maybe they should be considered high, low-quality information voters who don't fit in this category, which is for people who aren't engaged and don't pay much attention to politics. They may know that eggs cost more than they did, but they haven't a clue as to why that is, what causes inflation, or who is responsible for it. In other words, in keeping with their status as idiots, they are voting for things they don't really understand and because of that they have no idea what it will take to fix a problem such as inflation or who is best qualified to do so. Their response was to believe the most notorious liar in American political history and to rely on him to fulfill a promise that made no sense at all -- lowering prices "on day one" -- and for which he had extremely limited, if any, ability to honor. And absolutely no intention to do so. That's what all the talk about tariffs was about. They are primarily taxes on consumers and will raise prices not lower them. Would Trump lower the price of gasoline, which, in the interests of reducing miles driven by internal combustion engine drivers and so reduce our carbon footprint in a time of dangerous climate change? No. The American president has little impact on the price of a barrel of oil, which is set internationally. No problem, if you're going to believe on stupid thing, why not two, or ten, or everything a dumb, ignorant liar says.
Next up are the voters who may have switched from voting for Democrats to Republicans because of Joe Biden's catastrophic moral and political blunder to aid and abet Israel in committing war crimes and genocide against Palestinians. Those voters were right in being outraged by Biden's decisions and his failure, once the impact was visible for the whole world to see, to withdraw support and demand that Israel cease and desist. However, voting for a fascist was not a sensible response. There was no reason to believe that the Palestinian people would get better treatment by Trump and every reason to believe they would fare worse. Trump now dreams of depopulating Gaza -- sending Palestinians somewhere -- and turning the area into, what, a Trump-branded resort. I admit, that wasn't something even very engaged and well-informed voters would have imagined in 2024, but neither would they have believed that Trump would be good for Palestinians. Even if one gives Trump credit for the cease fire plan, that doesn't mean what comes next for Palestinians will be good. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Whose left? Of course there are the amazing long-time Republicans who either don't realize what their party has become or don't care, since they just hate Democrats. Their goal is a Democrat-free government and anyone carrying the Republican banner is OK with them. That doesn't require any thought at all, just reliance on old habits and well-established bigotry.
Not only was the decision voters made in choosing Trump a fantastically stupid and ignorant one, but it was one that has already caused far more deaths than what has happened in Gaza. Trump/Musk?Doge's decision to kill USAID has already been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Africa and in countries who needed US aid to prevent the deaths, often of young children. They are history now, but the death toll will continue to rise. Trump's appointment of RFK Jr. will ultimately result in countless more unnecessary deaths caused by anti-vax mentality and the gutting of an extraordinary amount of funding for scientific and medical research. As yet unknown is how many deaths may result from the installation of unfit and unqualified people in positions such as Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth) and DNI (Tulsi Gabbard). Neither of those two is in any way competent to do the jobs Trump has given them. None of Trump's ridiculous appointments can be considered surprising, since even in his first term he proved himself to be the world's worst judge of character, talent, and competence. One Buffoon-in-Chief picking other assistant buffoons.
While Enten seems to have selected data to make a more interesting claim for TV, I do think it’s relevant that Trump is slightly (but consistently) more popular than he was in his first term and despite almost universally bad results & images (jobs down, prices up, tariff uncertainty, masked ICE agents arresting regular people, losses in court cases, no Doge savings, national guard troops in cities) neither Trump nor Congressional Republicans have lost much support. As inflation was the most important issue in 2024 according to most pollsters, I expected that Trump would lose more support already. Basically that he would be at this first term low point in most polls.
Thanks for a clear explanation. While I have not watched CNN, and I try to avoid hearing the Pep Secretary's pronouncements (It blows my mind that American taxpayers pay her salary, which I'm sure is ongoing during the shutdown), I would probably come across this information and wonder where the heck they got those numbers. Now I know: They ignored evidence!
I've never watched cable news. I am old enough to recall when suddenly it was being showed on all the TV screens in airports. I called it "compulsory CNN." I quickly noted the repetitiveness in spite of the effort to make it sound like news was breaking any moment. To be fair, when the networks would jump on a story as breaking news, the anchors and others would drone on, even though there was no information yet. And then there was the attempt to find "human interest" just to keep the story going. (Example, someone who knew the suspect in elementary school.) I also disliked the advertisements on cable and non-cable TV, none of which ever influenced me to buy their products, once I aged out of Saturday morning cartoons.
I've never been on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Substack is my first venture, and, so far, it has been positive, as I decide to what I wish to subscribe, and there are no ads.
I do survey design and analysis as part of my work as a research scientist at a major university. I think your comment about the polling question Enten presented (Is Trump doing what he promised?) relates well to your October 7th article regarding the wording of questions. If this question was part of a scale, I suspect that it would show poor reliability and get dropped through factor analysis.
If a survey asked me if trump was doing as expected, as he promised, I’d say, yup, he is. trump hasn’t changed. He was obvious from the start. No surprises here. It boggled my mind that anyone could stand him before. It boggles my mind that his approval numbers are still above what we used to call the lunatic fringe of ~20%. If the survey question asks if I approve of his performance, my unchanged answer is clearly no. But if a survey asks if he’s doing what he said he would do, my answer has to be, yes, and faster than expected. Which means he’s got quite a team behind him.
Questions on the new site... will all the charts from here eventually get moved over? I'm not particularly interested in individual polls since deep dives into the data isn't what I'm after. The summaries shown on the charts I like. As someone who has lived in various states over the years, I like the map showing approval by state. Will it move over or disappear? I enjoy reading your page for just the reason I avoid TV news analysis with its cherry picking. Thanks for all your hard work.
CNN is subtly turning into Fox News light.
And here is some follow-up data from the CBS News/YouGov polling team:
"30% of those who say Trump's doing the "same things he promised in the campaign" disapprove of his job handling
Also notable: that "things he promised" topline has been falling, from 70% at the start of his term to around half now
Largest drop has been with independents (-24 pts since Feb)"
https://bsky.app/profile/kabirkhanna.bsky.social/post/3m2z2fsdgas2c
absolutely love your stuff! This one in particular is fabulous for me in revealing how the manipulation of words gets you a totally different meaning and from my perspective highlights America's gift to the world "MARKETING"!!
I saw that segment from CNN shown on Fox News show The Five. I literally yelled back at the TV, "Of course he's doing what he said he'd do!". DJT's more traditionally GOP supporters were always trying to assure the American public the positions he expressed were just hyperbole. " Don't listen to what he says, watch what he does.". Hmmm.
BTW, your posts are great. I wish more people could be made aware of the way polling and data reporting can be manipulated.
It was such an obvious sleight of hand
Cable news is in it's death throes meaning those who consume it die everyday. I get my news and information from places like Strength In Numbers, thoughtful well thought out arguments and insightful thinking. I know I'm not in the majority but I'm thankful places like this exist so I can keep my sanity.
Looking at the crosstabs on that CBS poll from last week, it also seems as though the "doing what he promised" question is kind of a partisan mirror - D 29/71, I 47/53, R 82/18. Given that I'd assume more than 30% of Democrats truly are not surprised by what he's done, I wonder if this question is vague enough that it just becomes "Yes = good for Trump, No = bad for Trump" and it breaks out that way.
If you assume people are giving answers that reflect thoughtful opinion and not partisan bias, the through-lines on these crosstabs get funny. On the economic better/worse/same question, Democrats are 3/83/14, which put together with the prior answer suggests that Democrats feel Trump has made them worse-off economically... and that has surprised them, since they expected him to do the opposite? Similarly, 47% of Republicans said his policies have kept things the same for them economically - a situation they hated Biden and Harris for putting them in - but they voted for him thinking he'd keep them stuck in it?
It seems to me that the "did what I expected" question doesn't carry much meaning for respondents, who treat it as just a good/bad on Trump without engaging. Meanwhile the "made my economic situation better/worse" question has some implications to it - surely, 47% of Republicans did not believe in November 2024 that Trump wouldn't improve their economic situation at all, so what does it mean that it's the best they can say for him now?
FWIW, I picked a CBS poll from last June to compare to - when asked whether Biden's policies would (not had) make them better off economically, Democrats split 37/6/57 - by this one (randomly picked, not cherry-picked) comparison, Trump is doing worse on this question with his own party now than Biden was then. Same with Independents, though by single digits. That poll also asked about what they expected for Trump - 77% of Republicans and 40% of Independents thought he'd make things better, so about half of those Rs and 2/3 of those Is have been "disappointed".
That's why he probably wouldn't win an election today, Harry.
Great comment. Thank you for digging into those crosstabs, Joe!
Polls are notoriously vulnerable to GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). Choice of questions, how they’re framed and which meanings are assigned to answers, make or break validity.
Trump may not have lived up to the expectations of many republicans who thought he would improve their lives even while totally living up to the expectations of democrats who foresaw the devastation his policies would unleash on all citizens regardless of party.
Combining both sets of expectations allows
Trump’s fluffers to produce a meaningless number they choose to interpret as “Trump kept his campaign vows and his popularity was unaffected.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. But it does keep Trump and his hangers-on happy, so a win?
Fluffers is PERFECT
Americans can no longer trust cable news or legacy media, and yes it disturbs me to be saying this or sounding like an uninformed conspiracy-infused MAGA-type, but it is true. We receive nothing but deceptive, intentional misinformation about our country, immigrants, laws, government, and precious little about the rest of the world, while being truncheoned with medical ads, and lately mostly banks and investment house ads, followed by the outright lies for extended car warranties, and other dubious crap that nobody would ever actually need or benefit by.
We CAN have a massive impact if we simply start not tuning in to cable news (except BBC, Democracy Now, and PBS) and being very very vocal about boycotting their advertisers. Do not buy one thing from these swindlers. Or any MAGA/Republican owned swindlers.
I think it's important to try to watch / listen / read the news reports from all sides of the political spectrum. Most issues have legitimate arguments on both sides. (Take Obamacare subsidies: Affordability vs National Debt.) I heard there was a recent poll in which the respondents said political polarization is now the biggest problem for our country. It seems no one hears anything that doesn't reinforce their own opinions anymore.
I believe the most serious problem we have, aside from a lack of civic education, loss of community, and general obliviousness, is deception, a human trait that is the hallmark of our species. Lying. We lie to ourselves and everybody else. Almost every news cast we hear is deceptive or lacking fact or nuance. Every commercial advertisement is deceptive. Religion is deceptive and requires a lack of critical thinking and education. Lying is the problem.
A lot of hypocrites out there, but also lots who don't recognize the lies. Good article on hypocrits in the WSJ this week.
It's really gotten bad since the billionaires started buying up media companies, and other media companies are keeping their head down to avoid notice.
I gave up cable years ago and never missed it.