The political landscape right now is more confusing than a corn maze. For every data point that suggests Republicans face headwinds, there seems to be another that suggests Democrats should hold their britches.
It all leaves this political analyst wondering just what the heck is going on out there, to paraphrase the great Vince Lombardi.
Trump’s popularity
Let’s start with President Donald Trump’s approval rating. Gallup released a poll last week putting Trump’s approval rating (37%), way down from the beginning of his second term (47%).
The poll made a lot of press.
Then you have the Wall Street Journal survey, which got a lot less play and showed something very different. Trump’s net approval ratings among registered voters (approval – disapproval), while still negative at -6 percentage points, have barely declined from earlier this year. His approval rating of 46% looks a lot like it did at the start of the year.
There are even surveys that have Trump’s approval rating basically equal to his disapproval rating.
Diving deeper into the data can leave one more befuddled, even when looking at the averages.
Trump’s approval rating with independents is lower than any president at this point in office. Yet he’s lost very little ground with Republicans since the beginning of the year. This is important because there are a lot of them (e.g. see the section below this one).
The average overall, regardless of how you compute the average, still does have Trump’s net approval negative. That’s where I think it is. Yet, I can’t guarantee it.
We’ve seen too many times in the last decade that the range of the results gave us a better understanding of the potential outcomes than the average did at pinpointing where things would end up.
Party identification
Pollsters will almost always ask how people identify themselves: Democrat, Republican or independent. Then they’ll follow that up by asking independents whether they lean toward the Democratic or Republican side of the aisle.
Party identification is one of the fundamental variables to understand how people will vote. Most Democrats will vote for Democratic candidates, while most Republicans will vote for Republican candidates.
No wonder a lot of people took note of the Pew Research Center’s annual benchmark poll that was released last week that showed 46% of the country were Republican or leaned Republican to 45% who were Democratic or leaned Democratic.
That margin is no different from last year’s version of the poll, before Trump won the presidency again.
Pew’s data, however, isn’t the only data. I asked Quinnipiac University for their polls conducted during roughly the same period.
Quinnipiac shows a pretty clear swing to the Democrats over the course of the year. During the January-to-February period, Republicans (including leaners) held a 1- to 3-point advantage on party affiliation.
Democrats, however, were ahead by 2 to 4 points in the April and June polls. This included two 4-point edges in both June surveys they put into the field.
I don’t know who is right. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Democrats may be slightly ahead, though that’s not great on a metric where they have usually been ahead over the years.
The generic congressional ballot
This question is one of my favorites. It asks respondents some form of “would you vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate from your district?”
The polling does seem to have the Democrats up.
The Journal has them up narrowly among registered voters by 3 points. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from June finds the parties about evenly matched, with Democrats at 40% to Republicans’ 38%.
This is well behind the pace of where Democrats were in either 2005 or 2017 — the years before they won wave elections in the midterms. The Democratic lead in those cycles was closer to 7 points.
Confused? You haven’t seen anything yet.
Ipsos’ poll actually looks no different from their final poll on the subject in 2024, the year Republicans held on to the House.
The Journal poll, which is one of Trump’s better ones, shows the Democrats gaining significantly from its final survey in 2024, when Republicans were up by 4 points.
But the seat-by-seat landscape in the House isn’t the most appealing for Democrats. Both the Cook Political Report and Inside Elections show more potential pickup opportunities for the Republicans than Democrats. This is without any pro-Republican redistricting that might occur in Texas — or potential pro-Democratic redistricting in other states as retaliation for whatever Texas does.
Democrats had more pickup chances than Republicans by this point in both 2005 and especially 2017, according to Cook.
I should point out, however, that Democrats don’t need a wave to take back the House. They need a small gain given the GOP’s razor-thin majority.
But with a smaller-than-usual lead on the generic ballot for Democrats and potential redistricting, that may not happen.
The bottom line
All of this leaves me a little befuddled. I believe Trump is more unpopular than not. Given that fact, I believe Republicans are in clear trouble for 2026.
I’d probably have said the same thing during the 2022 cycle, when Joe Biden’s approval rating was awful heading into those midterms. And while Democrats lost the House that fall, Republicans barely pulled it off.
This cycle strikes me as even more confusing.
And who can forget the most important variable? It’s still 2025.
It was only months before the 2022 midterms that Roe v. Wade got overturned and gave Democrats a political shot in the arm.
We have a long way to go.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
