If you’re an optimistic person, 33 percent can look pretty good. If you’re buying a raffle ticket, say, a one in three chance to win is incredible. Unfortunately for the GOP, Donald Trump isn’t buying raffle tickets.
A new poll from Reuters and Ipsos released
on Tuesday showed that Trump’s approval rating had bottomed out at 33 percent. At the end of July, Trump was hovering around that mark in the low 30s, meaning that American dissatisfaction with his performance hasn’t improved in weeks.
The chief reason is clear: it’s the Iran war. Reuters found that 80 percent of American adults think the war will go on for a long time, which means that almost no one is buying Trump’s repeated insistences that the war will soon end in a total U.S. victory. That number includes 71 percent of Republicans, even, that think we’re in for a long, drawn-out conflict.
And the costs of that conflict are only getting more and more apparent for the average American. The national average for a gallon of gas is $4.10, something that most Americans are feeling on a daily basis. That pressure is so acute that Trump himself had to address it – in the most defiant, Trumpian possible way.
“For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have… a nuclear weapon,” Trump said at an event in Garden City, New Jersey. “You’re at $4… It’s ok… I will never apologize, I did the right thing.”
That’s not exactly a convincing message to voters. While Trump claims the Iran war is going well – at times in this speech referring to the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as “a wall of steel” – the U.S. has, in reality, suffered tactical defeat after defeat. We’ve exhausted critical reserves of both defensive and offensive munitions, re-created a much stupider version of the Tanker War of the late 1980s, and put our sailors in such awful conditions that they are literally jumping overboard to escape their interminable deployments.
“You just have to remember that what we’re doing is a great service to the world,” Trump said in Garden City.
All of this has contributed to an extremely telling flip: for the first time in 10 years, the public now thinks Democrats will do a better job with the economy than Republicans. The margins are slim – 38 to 35 in terms of who’s better economically – but it’s still a battle that Democrats have been trying to win for more than a decade.
The GOP still commands a polling lead on immigration, with 40 percent saying they trust Republicans more and 38 percent saying they trust Democrats, but the margin is only 2 percent – the lowest it’s been during Trump’s term.
Trump has essentially eroded most of the ideological pillars that Republicans have run on in recent years, just in time for an immediately consequential midterm election cycle. Poll numbers aren’t everything, of course – the Trump administration is already trying to meddle with the electorate directly by ending mail-in voting for the 2026 cycle – but they do represent a significant public opinion swing away from a president who has only been in office about a year and a half. If the Democrats take at least one house of Congress, it could help blunt whatever plans Trump has in store for his lame duck period on the back half of this term.
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