US Politics
CNN pollster points out the struggles Trump faces in polls and delivers a blow to an NFL team as well
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Donald Trump is posting poor approval scores across the board in recent polls, a showing that prompted CNN data guru Harry Enten to compare the president to the ever-troubled New York Jets NFL franchise.
“Just look at Donald Trump’s net approval rating,” Enten told host John Berman in a segment Thursday, pointing to negative approval differentials in the high teens across four different recent polls. “Negative! Negative! Negative! Negative!”
“Trump is underwater like the New Jersey Jets!” Enten added of the franchise, which is affiliated with New York but plays in New Jersey. The Jets haven’t a winning season in over a decade.
“I was gonna make a Jets joke but there are too many and not enough time,” Berman added of the team, which finished the season with a poor 3-and-14 record.
“What issues is President Trump doing well on?” Enten added. “None of them really. He’s doing poorly on all of them.”
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Indeed, recent polls paint a grim picture of the president’s support, as his party heads into the 2026 midterms.
A recent AP-NORC poll found that 47 percent of respondents, the largest share, thought Trump was focused on the wrong priorities, while 53 percent thought the economy was somewhat worse since he took office.
Faced with these kinds of indicators, Republicans down the ballot are expected to lose the House of Representatives in the midterms. Democrats fear the president will try to interfere with the election results somehow to hold onto influence anyway, after the Trump administration has pushed unusual mid-decade redistricting and sent armed federal agents into mostly Democratic cities.
Unpopularity isn’t exactly new for the president.
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Some aggregators show the president had a brief, slim majority approval in January, but other than that, his support has been in the minority and declining the entire time he’s been back in office.
The president is now nearing the lowest approval levels he saw in his first term, a worrying indicator for his future success, given that presidential approval often declines over the course of a term.
Things might only get worse if the president’s promised manufacturing renaissance doesn’t arrive.
Despite introducing worldwide tariffs last year meant to encourage U.S. manufacturing growth, manufacturing jobs declined throughout last year, according to data.