What your news diet says about your politics

Breaking down Trump's approval and 2026 midterms vote by Americans' primary news source

I start every weekday the same way: My alarm clock (not my phone, an actual physical alarm clock) goes off at 6:45, and I immediately make coffee and walk down to my basement gym and work out. While exercising (strength training or a stationary bike, depending on the day), I turn on my TV and stream a hellish 4-way simulcast of cable and network news — specifically Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and my local ABC affiliate. I normally have the TV muted and listen to a podcast; I’m just using cable news to visually monitor what stories people are talking about.

I acknowledge that this is a borderline psychopathic way to start the day, but I consider it part of my job to know what “the news” is and what other people are paying attention to. Also, it’s just an hour a day while I’m doing something else productive, so I don’t think I’m fracturing my attention too much. (And also to be fair (to me), I did not seek out an expensive cable news subscription to do this; I got a discounted 6-month YouTube TV subscription last August to watch NFL games, and I figure this is another way to get more value out of the package.)

Anyway, I think watching this much news is mostly a waste of electricity, but occasionally something of interest will come up. On Wednesday morning, Dec. 10, I noticed that the three non-Fox channels were all playing the same clip from a speech Donald Trump gave in Pennsylvania the night before. In this clip, Trump remarks that the affordability issue is a “hoax” meant to tarnish his presidency. Meanwhile, Fox was playing a clip on repeat of an airplane making an emergency landing on a highway in Florida.

This got me thinking about my recent articles on affordability and cable news. If Trump is telling his supporters that concerns about prices are a hoax, and his favorite network is effectively shielding its audience from concerns about prices, what does that say about the parallel information worlds voters are living in — and how those worlds shape our views of the economy, and of the president?

In other words, how do people who mostly only watch Fox News differ from those who mostly watch (or read!) other sources? And, zooming out, what can we learn about politics by studying media diets? We can be reasonably sure there are large differences in Trump’s approval and the generic ballot vote based on what news people pay attention to — but how big are they?

In this week’s Friday Chart of The Week, the first for 2026, I cook up some fresh crosstabs from a recent Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll and answer these questions.

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Note: I am trying to be maximally transparent with my journalism and share code and data as much as possible. I shared the data for this piece alongside an article I published last month, “Affordability voters favor Democrats over Republicans for 2026 House midterms.”

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Fox viewers are mostly alone in rating Trump well

Let’s look at views of Trump and the 2026 midterms among viewers of different news outlets. In my essay on cable news, I wrote that one way right-leaning channels such as Fox have helped Republicans is by focusing coverage on cultural, non-economic news. Given Trump’s lower approval ratings with voters who say the economy is most important to them, we would expect this dynamic to help Trump (by amplifying coverage of issues he is stronger on).

Indeed, we see exactly this dynamic in the chart below: Americans who say they mostly watch Fox give President Trump a net job approval rating of +69, whereas his overall approval rating in this poll among all adults was -15.

Note: The chart below is interactive; hover over a dot to see numbers for that metric across all news outlets.

This chart more or less speaks for itself. Each row represents a group of people who say they mainly get political news from that source, and each dot represents that group’s views on a certain question: the purple dots show the Republican margin on the 2026 House generic ballot among that group, while the red and orange dots show Trump’s net job approval overall and on the economy/inflation.

Apart from people who primarily get their news from Fox News, talk radio, or other conservative media, Trump is underwater among news consumers. Republicans also trail on the generic ballot with almost every news audience in the country — again, apart from the right-wing information bubble.

Then, note that in almost every group, people rate Trump’s handling of the economy worse than his job performance overall (the orange dot sits to the left of the red one). The big (though not only) exception is MSNBC viewers. Among them, Trump’s net job approval is about 15 points lower overall than it is on the economy and inflation. My take is that this is mostly selection, not persuasion: the MSNBC audience is already overwhelmingly anti-Trump and is saturated with coverage of his corruption, court cases, and attacks on democracy, so they reserve their absolute worst ratings for his overall behavior in office rather than for macroeconomic management.

One interesting wrinkle: It’s striking that viewers of ABC News are just as partisan as people who watch CNN or read The New York Times. This ties in neatly with my previous point on this Substack that mainstream news outlets hurt their business when they go out of their way to appeal to conservatives, who mostly fled network news and non-WSJ print decades ago. ABC News or Reuters trying to win over Republican viewers would be like Speedo showing up at a marathon to sell swim caps.

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So what does all this tell us? I have two broader thoughts.

First, regular Fox viewers are clearly living in a different political universe than consumers of most other types of political news. In the overall numbers, Trump is unpopular, and Republicans are cruising toward a brutal midterms. But among people who say they mostly watch Fox, he is an indomitable president with a decent record on the economy, and Republicans are sailing smoothly to another House majority next year.

This should be a warning to people who spend most of their time in one siloed media bubble. If your world is built out of viral Fox clips showering the president with praise, it is easy to assume that is how most other voters experience politics, too. It is not. Plenty of people barely or never follow political news — around 40% in our poll. A mixed factual news diet will give you a better understanding of politics (but maybe substitute Fox with the Wall Street Journal, or the new WaPo Editorial Board).

And second, based on my anecdotes from about 5 months of regular watching, and my experience inside the news industry, I think it’s very likely that news producers and executives make decisions about what to cover based on what they think their audience will eat up. News is an attention game — just like everything else these days. And when cord-cutting is destroying your company, you have very little incentive (from a business perspective) to air a clip that your audience might disagree with.

Now imagine you’re running a news outlet with the same pressures, and your core constituency is a group of the most partisan, ideological, die-hard supporters of the president? Oh, and the president himself is simultaneously your most famous viewer and harshest critic. Now it’s really tempting to air footage of an emergency plane landing.