From Nate Silver:
Nate Silver: <[https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/2102884250400014633]>: ‘feel like this has been one of our more underrated charts. If you throw out voters who weakly approve or disapprove of Trump's performance and only look at strong approval/disapproval, his net approval rating is -29, even worse than his overall -22:In other words, even though Trump's approval rating isn't good (now 37.6%), it's being propped by people who lukewarmly approve. Whereas the disapproval is very entrenched. A much different dynamic than the first term. Trump's approval has had some news-driven spikes. But the overall trend has been quite persistently downward. It's easy to convert a "weak approve" to some form of "disapprove". It's hard to convert a "strong disapprove" into any form of "approve"…
What I would really like to see, of course, is the movement: a poll that followed 10,000 people over time, and reported how they shifted from basket to basket. But nobody thinks that would pay. And nobody in non-profit-land appears to think that would be worth funding, to my frustration.
But note this: Trump organized a coup attempt. And in its aftermath, he was more popular in America than he is now. This is the lowest net approval of any president at least since Herbert Hoover, and perhaps since long before (we do not really have polling before 1945). “News-driven spikes” that fade is exactly what you would predict from a presidency governing by chaos-monkey-fu. Each new outrage buys a day of base enthusiasm, and then compounds the strong-disapproval pile that never shrinks.
Silver’s own midterm model has already drawn the obvious inference: This is turning into a blue-wave environment. Expert raters clinging to neutrality are somehow anticipating that Trump’s awful numbers will not leak over and affect other Republican candidates. The argument that it is likely to is that strong disapproval is not just a polling artifact but turnout energy, for “lukewarm approvers” often find something else to do on a Tuesday in November.
So yes: We loathe him, we really loathe him, we loathe him for reasons that are specific, economic, constitutional, and moral. The chart's -29 says the quiet part out loud: We are not a coalition of cranks. We are many. But we need to turn out at the polls in November.
##public-reason
##chart-of-the-day
#yes-we-loathe-trump-we-really-loathe-trump-for-very-good-reasons-and-we-are-many
#trump-approval
#nate-silver
#strong-disapproval
#midterms-2026
