Donald Trump‘s approval rating has sunk to its lowest point since April 2021, a new poll suggests on Sunday, just days after the ex-president announced two new campaign events for candidates he’s endorsed in the midterms.
The tides appear to be shifting there too, the NBC News survey suggests, with Republicans and Democrats now deadlocked in Congressional preferences after months of GOP dominance.
Trump is fresh off of one of his signature Make America Great Again rallies on Saturday night. He was in Youngstown, Ohio to stump for Senate candidate JD Vance as well as three hopefuls for the House of Representatives.
But Sunday’s NBC News poll suggests that his appeal may be fading across the country, even despite a recent boost in support seen in other surveys since the FBI‘s Mar-a-Lago raid.
Thirty-four percent of respondents said they view Trump positively, while 54 percent said the opposite.
In a nod to his divisive nature, the two largest shares of voters said they view him ‘very’ negatively and ‘very’ positively at 46 and 20 percent, respectively.
It comes on the heels of the former president announcing two more rallies in the next two weeks, signaling an uptick in his campaign appearances.
Donald Trump’s approval rating is the lowest it’s been in 16 months, according to a new poll
This coming Friday, Trump will be in North Carolina where his endorsement skyrocketed House Rep. Ted Budd to victory in a contentious GOP Senate primary.
He’ll be in Michigan the week after, where Trump has targeted incumbent Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer with support for political commentator-turned-candidate Tudor Dixon.
And with yesterday’s event in Ohio, Trump will have held three rallies in three weeks.
His arch-rival, President Joe Biden, has also returned to the campaign trail with a blaze of enthusiasm.
After months of dismal ratings, the Democratic commander-in-chief actually saw an increase in his job approval in NBC’s Sunday poll.
The latest poll shows he’s backed by 45 percent of voters, a slight increase from 42 percent in the previous two surveys in August and May.
However, like Trump, Biden is also generally underwater – his job disapproval rating is 52 percent.
Sunday’s poll also appears to upend projections of a decisive ‘red wave’ in Congress this year, as is generally expected halfway through a president’s first term.
Republicans were preferred by 1% in August, but today both parties are tied with 46% of the vote.
Only 8% of respondents said they were undecided, suggesting that the House and Senate margins might be narrow.
In May, it was divided in the same way.
Overall, though, people are not gravitating toward Democrats due to any appreciable change in national view.
Sixty-eight percent of respondents—a sizable percentage but a modest drop from 74 percent in August—believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.
In spite of ongoing warnings of an impending recession, the vast majority of those who felt it was headed in the wrong direction blamed the status of the economy.
Of those who believed the nation was headed in the wrong direction, 41% cited the economy and inflation as the two most pressing problems. Political disagreement was cited as the second-most common reason (16%).