Data journalist and pollster Elliott Morris was taken aback on Friday after new polling showed President Donald Trump receiving his single-lowest favorability rating of his political career, and the lowest of any past president at this point in their term since the 1940s.
According to the polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne, as of Thursday, Trump’s net approval had sunk to -21.4, with 37.2% approving of his job performance and 58.6% disapproving.
“That’s the lowest mark of his second term,” Morris wrote in an analysis published Friday on his Substack, Strength In Numbers.
“How bad is -21.4? When compared to past presidents, Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in their term, going back to [former President Franklin D. Roosevelt]. Fourteen months in, no one else was this far underwater. Only Joe Biden, at the beginning of the 2022-23 inflation crisis, was close – and Trump is outrunning him by about 10 points.”
Historically, Trump has only outperformed former President Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal in terms of net favorability, but only if treating Trump as a second-term president, which some may dispute due to the president’s two non-consecutive terms.
Unlike Nixon, however, Trump’s waning favorability did not appear attributable to one specific scandal, Morris noted, but instead, “several negative shocks to his presidency,” including “fallout from his tariffs, mass deportations, the Oct. 2025 government shutdown, and an unpopular war.”
“Trump’s approval ratings slide doesn’t look like the result of one isolated crisis so much as the cumulative effect of a presidency that keeps making voters feel not listened to and less economically secure,” Morris wrote.
“Again and again, the biggest drops in his standing follow events that raised costs, heightened uncertainty, or reinforced a sense that the country is off track. And because the president has shown almost no ability – or interest – in winning back support, his unpopularity looks less like a purely political or economic liability and more like a defining feature of his second term.”