Trump's Approval Rating Shifts, Famed Polling Expert Says

President Donald Trump's average approval rating dropped by -0.9% during the past week, according to famed polling expert Nate Silver in the latest edition of his Silver Bulletin blog published on Monday (January 26).

Trump was reported to have a -12.9% net approval rating on Monday (January 26) after having a -12.0% approval rating one week prior, which is still higher than the same point of his first term but lower than his contemporaries.

"We’ve seen lots of new polls this week, and they haven’t been great for Donald Trump," Silver wrote. "His net approval rating in our average dropped from -12.0 on Monday to -12.9 today. That means Trump is still slightly more popular than he was at this point during his first term (-16.4 net approval rating), but he’s far less popular than [former President] Barack Obama (-8.5) and [former President] George W. Bush (-10.4) were one year into their second terms.

"Approval of Trump’s handling of immigration also hit a second term low of net -10.0 in our average yesterday. But his approval on the economy has actually risen somewhat to net -16.5 — it was around -20 at the start of the year. Previously, when pollsters measured Trump’s overall job approval and his rating on the economy, the former was meaningfully higher than the latter."

Trump average approval rating was reported to be at -12%, with a 42.8% approval and a 54.8% disapproval according to RealClearPolling.com based on polls conducted between January 8 and January 22.

Silver gained notoriety for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election, as well as former President Obama's re-election win in 2012 and former President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 election. The pollster was, however, criticized for giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning over Trump after the former president 304 electoral college votes to win the election.

"I think people shouldn’t have been so surprised," Silver told the Harvard Gazette in 2017. "Clinton was the favorite, but the polls showed, in our view, particularly at the end, a highly competitive race in the Electoral College. We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence. Why did people think it was much less than that? I think there are a few things."