A new Wall Street Journal poll puts President Trump’s job approval at 37 percent, the lowest pre-midterm mark for any president in the paper’s surveys back to 1990.
The survey, fielded September 16 through 21 among 1,500 registered voters, also found 61 percent disapproving of his job performance. Newsweek reported the figures after the Journal released the poll Friday.
Those numbers land as Republicans brace for the November midterms, with candidates and strategists already managing voter anxiety over the economy and the cost of living.
In the same Wall Street Journal survey, 65 percent of respondents rated the U.S. economy negatively and only 33 percent viewed it positively. Sixty percent said Trump’s economic policies had made the economy worse; 25 percent said they had made it better.
Eleven percent of voters who backed Trump in 2024 said they now regret that vote. And 11 percent of Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA movement said they plan to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate this fall.
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, tied the slide to pocketbook pressure.
Kondik told Newsweek:
"Overall it's pretty clear that Trump's numbers are worse now than they were eight years ago. Dissatisfaction with the economy/inflation is probably the biggest reason why."
That reading matches the Journal’s own economic battery. Negative ratings on the economy outran positive ones by nearly two to one. Assessments of Trump’s economic policies skewed heavily negative in the same sample.
Nate Silver’s polling tracker, as reported Thursday, put Trump’s net approval at minus 22.4, the low point of the current term and lower than any point in his first term, Silver said, even after Jan. 6. VoteHub’s average showed the same minus 22.4 net.
Silver posted on X:
"Trump approval now at -22.4, his low point for the term and now lower than at any point in his first term, even after Jan. 6,"
Recent standalone surveys ran even colder on the raw approval number. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released earlier this month put Trump at 32 percent approval. An American Research Group survey put the figure at 29 percent.
A Civiqs-based state-by-state analysis published this month found Trump underwater on net approval in 41 states and in every major battleground. Only nine states showed a positive net rating. Some of the steepest drops appeared in Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.
In the Midwest, an Emerson College poll found Trump’s net approval falling from minus 9 to minus 14 over the previous month, with disapproval at 56 percent.
The White House has repeatedly waved off polling of this kind. Newsweek emailed the White House for comment on the new Journal numbers.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle, in prior remarks to Newsweek, cast the 2024 election as the “ultimate poll,” said nearly 80 million Americans voted for Trump’s agenda, and said the administration had made “historic progress” on jobs, inflation, and housing affordability.
That is the administration’s core defense: voters already delivered a verdict at the ballot box, and the policy record on work, prices, and housing should be judged against that mandate.
Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of Inside Elections, summed up the structural risk for the president’s party.
Gonzales told Newsweek earlier this month:
"Any midterm election with an unpopular president is potentially treacherous for his party,"
Wall Street Journal reporting described Republican candidates and strategists battling growing concern about November. Some candidates have sought distance from the White House on the Iran conflict and on economic policy. Others have pushed back in public.
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said this week that lawmakers should not be labeled disloyal for disagreeing with the president. He argued that some White House officials needed to “get over a loyalty test or a perfect test,” and that distance from the White House may be required when disagreements arise.
That tension, loyalty messaging inside the administration versus candidate self-preservation on the trail, is now part of the pre-midterm landscape the Journal and other trackers are measuring.
The Wall Street Journal’s comparison set runs back to 1990. In that stretch of surveys, no president has entered a midterm cycle with an approval rating this low. Pair that with underwater net ratings across most of the map, soft economic assessments, and a slice of 2024 Trump voters already expressing regret, and the political warning lights are obvious.
Republicans do not need a lecture on midterm gravity. When voters say the economy feels worse, the party holding the White House has to answer first, and November is where that answer gets scored.
