Trump faces a large intensity gap in his approval rating
Nearly a majority of Americans strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president. That is starting to have political costs
On Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump is trying to get the Republican Party to rebrand its "One Big Beautiful Bill" because the law's poll numbers are so bad. In July, when Congress was taking up the bill, I showed how incredibly unpopular the OBBBA was, making it perhaps even the most unpopular law ever.
Maybe someone in the West Wing reads Strength In Numbers.
Meanwhile, Trump's approval rating in our average is hovering near the low point for his term, around 41.9% approval with all adults. And he scores a 53.7% disapproval rating — making him the most unpopular president ever at this point in a president’s term. Other than the record he set in his first term, that is.
But Trump's problem is not just that his disapproval is high. He also faces a disproportionately high percentage of people who say they strongly disapprove of his presidency. Today’s Chart of the Week: Trump's record-setting disapproval rating.
Beyond dichotomous approval ratings
Someone sent me the following Bluesky post earlier this week:
This is a very good observation, if it's true. Usually, presidential approval is reported as a binary — you either approve or disapprove of the job the president is doing. But many pollsters (including for our Strength In Numbers/Verasight partnership) ask voters to also indicate how strongly they feel about the president.
These 4-way approval breakdowns can help assess electoral outcomes and political backlash. That’s because intensity matters; someone who strongly approves (or disapproves) of a president is more likely to vote for (or against) them/their party in the next election. So it matters, for example, if the ~90% of people who support the president are die-hard MAGA voters, or if just 20% are.
The author of the post says the percentage of people who "somewhat" approve of Trump's presidency, divided by the percentage who "strongly" or "somewhat" approve of it, is significantly higher than before. Let's compare Trump's polls today to those at the beginning of his term and find out if that's true.
I went digging through the polling archives and selected data from the following YouGov/The Economist polls fielded between September 2009 and September 2025.
With these polls, I graphed Trump's approval today vs his approval in January, and included other reference points from previous presidencies (more on those in a minute):
As you can see, the proportion of all Trump approvers who only "somewhat" approve of the way he's handling his job as president (41%) is indeed higher than in January (30%), but it's not an earth-shattering difference. For further comparison, in his first week in office in 2017, 38% of people who approved of Trump's presidency were soft approvers.
What's more eye-catching to me is the growing percentage of people who say they strongly disapprove of the president, especially relative to the strong approval percentage. In January of this year, there was just a two percentage point gap between Trump's strong opposers and supporters. Today, that gap is 22 points — and the largest ever for this point in a presidential term.
Why a low approval rating matters
Today, nearly a majority of Americans strongly disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, twice as large as the percentage of adults who strongly approve of him. If you took all the people who strongly disapprove of Trump and got them to vote against him, their share of the vote would be higher than the share Trump got in his first term. And if you add even just a third of the soft disapprovers, you get a vote share higher than Trump's popular vote victory in 2024.
A position this poor eventually leads to political or electoral costs (or both). The president's (failed, so far) rebranding attempt of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act suggests that even he recognizes the political liability of being associated with deeply unpopular policies.
And regardless of political or electoral impacts, it's important for our understanding of ourselves to properly calibrate our sense of support for Trump. The president would like you to believe, for example, that his mass imprisonment and deportation of unauthorized immigrants is broadly popular. The same goes for his deployment of the National Guard to cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. (and maybe soon, Chicago).
But as far back as March, it was clear that Trump was not generally popular, and that the cornerstones of his agenda were unpopular, too. The current record-setting nature of his strong disapproval percentage highlights this theme again. Trump is not an indomitable leader with FDR-levels of support from the masses, despite his claims. He wants you to think he is, because popularity gives him power, But the reality is that Trump is governing with intense opposition from nearly half the country.
It's not a question of if being unpopular will hurt Trump and the GOP. The historical relationship between presidential approval and election results — and Trump’s recent interest in rebranding the OBBBA — suggests it's a question of when.
"Trump's "strongly disapprove" numbers are record-setting (not in a good way)"
Sounds good to me.
Perhaps a better way to say it would be: It's not a question of if being unpopular will hurt Trump and the GOP. The historical relationship between presidential approval and election results ... suggests it's a question of whether that will happen in time to save our democracy.