The thermostat comes for Trumpism

The public cares more about inflation and the economy now than in 2024, and less about immigration and crime

One hundred days ago, in his second inaugural address, Donald Trump told the world that "the golden age of America begins right now." He promised an economy that was the envy of the world, an end to crime and undocumented immigration, and respect for the U.S. on the world stage. A month later, in late February, Trump told a meeting of the Republican Governors Association that the party was going to continue their winning spree into the 2026 midterms, saying, “I think we’re going to really increase our margins by a lot."

Barring a significant external shock or major change in the president’s policy agenda, that prediction is very unlikely to come true. Over his first 100 days Trump’s standing has materially eroded on two fronts: issue approval, which has been well covered so far, and issue salience, which has not. And since the question of which issues people care about feeds into current debates among Democratic-aligned strategists and pundits, I figure we should devote special attention to discussing some striking new polling numbers.

Trump is underwater on every major issue

Let's start with how the public views Trump's job as president so far. According to my polling aggregator, Trump's overall net approval is a pitiful -9.5 today. The percentage of American adults who approve of what he's doing as POTUS is just 43.5% today, down from 50% at the start of his presidency. His disapproval rating is now 53%.

President Trump's net rating today is about half a percentage point lower than his net rating at this point in his first term, marking a new historical low. No president has ever been this unpopular this early in their presidency.

Worse, Trump's 53% disapproval rating today is actually higher than his disapproval rating on this day in his first term. On April 29, 2017, my average had Trump at a 42% approval rating and 51.2% disapproval rating. So Trump's lower overall rating is due to an increase in the share of Americans who express a negative attitude about him, not just a decrease in the share who approve (which would arguably be a less-bad trend).

Trump's approval ratings on individual issues have also sunk precipitously and in rough parallel to his overall rating. The largest decrease has been on the president's handling of inflation and the cost of living. Whereas on January 30, according to an average of issue polls calculated by Adam Carlson, a pollster, 40% of Americans approved of the job Trump was doing on prices and 40% disapproved, today just 38% of Americans feel he is doing a good job. A near super-majority of 59%, meanwhile, disapprove of how he is doing. And while the economy was a +7 issue for Trump in January, he's now underwater on the broad issue by 14 points.

Take a minute to digest this. Just 100 days into his term Trump is posting 2022- to 2023-level Biden numbers on his handling of the economy. That's despite inheriting a 3% inflation rate and healthy labor market and business conditions. The Economist last fall put a picture of a dollar bill rocketing into space on their cover to show the dominance of the American economic engine. Then, the newspaper asked: "America’s economy is bigger and better than ever. Will politics bring it back to Earth?" (The answer, as it turned out, was “yes.”)

But the most remarkable and politically significant decline for Trump is on immigration. Despite campaigning successfully on the issue in 2024, when Americans were preoccupied by a porous border and high-profile violent crimes blanketing right-leaning media for the GOP to score political points, polls now show that more Americans disapprove of Trump's immigration policy than approve of it.

The decline has come almost entirely since April 12, when Trump appeared in the Oval Office alongside President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and refused to return to America Kilmer Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who had been illegally removed from Maryland to a counter-terrorism prison in Bukele's country. Back then, Trump's overall immigration approval was a net +5, but it looked like the president was vulnerable on particularly unpopular parts of his agenda, such as deporting parents of child citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants who have been in America for decades. As I wrote then, there is a political opportunity in overreach:

Donald Trump has made a series of missteps on the economy over the last couple of weeks. Voters are now souring on him on his strongest issues, the economy and inflation, for example, and his tariffs are deeply unpopular, too. You can add Monday's Oval Office meeting to this list.

As predicted, Trump has since sunk to -3 on immigration approval. My theory for this is that criticism of several deportations and violations of federal court orders have shaped Americans' assessments of his overall immigration policy. This is an example, similar to how the Affordable Care Act for a short time shaped attitudes on "health care," of how parties can lose advantages on issues as the underlying components making up the broader policy umbrella change in popularity and salience.

And it's on salience where Trump, and the Republican Party more broadly, has lost a ton of important ground.

The policies Trump does best on are now less important to Americans

Gallup earlier this month released a poll that I didn't see get a ton of press, but definitely should have. It shows that the issues Americans view as the most important, or "salient," in 2024 versus April of 2025.

Gallup's poll finds an increase in the percentage of Americans who care "a great deal" about these issues:

• The economy

• Health care

• Social Security

• Federal spending

• Unemployment

And Gallup has found a decrease in the share of Americans who care about:

• Crime

• Illegal immigration

• Drug use

• Possibility of future terrorist attacks

• Hunger/Homelessness

• Energy affordability

• Race relations

Here's this data in chart form:

Gallup says this trend is due in part to polarization in priorities. Since Republicans care more about right-coded issues such as crime and immigration, when they ease up on issues their party has an advantage on, simply because their party is in power now, the issue landscape naturally shifts against them. Gallup writes:

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and Republicans and Republican leaners express significantly different degrees of worry on all issues except the possibility of a terrorist attack in the U.S. Republicans are more worried than Democrats about the federal budget deficit, crime, illegal immigration, drug use, and the size and power of the federal government. Democrats express more worry than Republicans on every other issue.

As Trump has replaced Biden, Democrats have become significantly more worried about 10 of the 14 issues measured last year, while Republicans have become less worried about 12. The steepest drops in Republican concern are seen for inflation (-18 points), possible U.S. terrorist attacks (-17 points), the economy and energy affordability (-16 points each).

However there has been a notable asymmetry in this polarization. While the share of Republicans saying they worry about the economy "a great deal" has fallen 16 points since 2024, the percentage of Democrats who care a great deal about it has risen by 34!

One way to look at all this data is to add up all the issue-by-issue changes in (a) salience and (b) Trump approval, then average across all the issues. That will give you a single number, at any given time point, to assess the direction the public is leaning on the most salient issues in the country. The number captures which party the public trusts on the issues they tell pollsters are the most important to them.

Here's what that looks like if I take Gallup's 2024 salience data and Trump's starting issue approval numbers on the public’s top 3 problems. I created a Party Salience-and-Advantage Index (PSA) for January, and do the same for April using Gallup's 2025 salience data and Trump's current issue approval averages:

Compared to January, there has been a significant shift left on Americans’ priorities and who they want handling them. Trump used to have an advantage on both (a) approval and (b) salience, since the issues he was most trusted on were the most salient. But now, especially since Trump’s economic approval has cratered, Democrats have an issue on both salience and trust. So the chart goes from red to blue.

I'll update this chart over the next 16 months so we can see if it's predictive of things like news coverage or the results of the midterms in 2026.

Thermostatic politics and issue prioritization

The shift toward Democrats on both issue approval and issue salience might be a consequence of Trump's unpopular proposals across a range of key government policies. And the year-to-date change in the S&P 500 cannot be ignored. But one other part of the story here is undoubtedly just good-old-fashioned "thermostatic politics", baby!

Thermostatic politics is the political science term for how the public predictably reacts to changes in government spending, say for defense or education, by adjusting its “thermostat” in the opposite direction. If spending gets too "hot," the public will "cool" down and express a desire for less spending relative to the current level, and vice versa.

Part of doing politics as an elected leader, the literature on the thermostat says, is figuring out the tough math of how much the public’s preferences for relative changes in spending trade off with their preferences for absolute levels of spend. The public may say it wants “hotter” defense spending, but does than mean a $200 billion increase or $200 million? And does that satisfy their desires for a strong military, and the funding required to accomplish that goal?

Or, to make this more relevant: When the public tells you it wants a secure border and to deport violent criminal illegal immigrants, does that mean you only deport violent criminals, or do you include legal residents with children and no criminal records, too? When the country elects you to do a 2017-2019 economy again, do you ease supply pressures and incentivize building to bring prices down, or do you nuke the dollar and 40% of container traffic with China? Ah, choices…

Usually, thermostatic politics is invoked when discussing spending or mass trust in the parties to handle any issue. But I would posit that here, we may be seeing a thermostatic reaction on issue salience/party prioritization, too. Now that a Republican is in the White House, the thinking might go, the average Republican may be less worried about issues they trust Republicans more to handle, and more concerned about Democratic-leaning ones. Under this theory, around periods of political change (including changes in the party that controls the White House, House, and Senate), we should naturally see a decrease in salience for the issues that the new incumbent leads on, and an increase in the salience of issues on which the public trusts the opposition more.

That's just a theory, though. And when you're coming up with theories, it usually helps to focus on clean mechanisms with lots of data. There is of course a cleaner explanation right now, one that the Ockhamites will favor, and that is simply this: Trump badly mismanaged trade and the economy and deported people the public didn't want deported, so now they are worried about the economy and less worried about him deporting the other people they originally wanted him to deport. Executive overreach has the people signaling for cooler policy.

The upshot of that is also pretty straightforward. The shift in issue approvals and salience gives Democrats a lot of room to maneuver on both the economy/inflation, where they lead and where the public is paying a lot of attention to Republicans' missteps, and on immigration, where Democrats have a smaller lead but where salience has also fallen.

Based on these data, I think Trump has had the worst first 100 days for a president ever — even worse than in his first term. And these trends show no sign of improving on their own.