A Very Unpopular President

President Trump’s disapproval rating hit fifty-eight percent, a new high. This is a milestone but not an outlier. Directionally, the president is deeply unpopular with the country he governs.

Often people respond to an action taken by this president by suggesting some variation of “he suffers no consequences.” This number invites a chance to pin down what that means.

A president with a disapproval rating that high is suffering consequences. The daily verdict of the country is that the president is doing a bad job. On specific issues like his handling of the economy or rising prices, the reasons he was elected, the verdict is truly dismal. In a new AP poll, 76% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s handling of the cost of living.

What has gone missing are the institutional consequences that disapproval used to trigger. Public opinion is working. The machinery that once converted public opinion into accountability is not. The jury came back. The foreman spoke and then everyone went out to lunch, including the accused.

What used to happen is that lawmakers would feel this public disapproval and respond, for fear of being voted out of office. They would call out a president, hold oversight hearings, comment publicly about a deteriorating economy, national security risks, and the dignity of the public square. With so many safe districts, that intermediate mechanism of transmission no longer functions as designed. Members of the president’s party in safe districts worry more about primary challenges, where a key — if not the key — factor is loyalty to the president. The very disapproval that should loosen their allegiance tightens it.

So the question for the 2026 midterm elections is whether the transmission lines still carry current. There is early evidence that they do. In the seven congressional special elections held during the 2025-2026 cycle, Democrats have overperformed their 2024 baselines by an average of seventeen points. Since January 2025, Democrats have flipped thirty state legislative seats while Republicans have flipped none. In state legislative special elections, Democrats have retained roughly 38 percent of their 2024 general election turnout; Republicans have retained only 28 percent. The signal is already being sent.

But a signal sent is not a signal received. It could get clogged in several places at once — in districts drawn to be immune to national mood, in media environments that reframe a collective verdict as a partisan attack, in an electorate that has sorted itself so thoroughly by geography and identity that presidential performance barely registers against party loyalty. General apathy could dull the charge further. At the moment Republicans show more of it than Democrats, but widespread disillusionment — the feeling that political signals are simply broken — remains possible if no correction arrives.¹

These clogging factors do not all carry equal weight, but we will not know the proportion until November. (And even then we’ll be arguing about what mattered and what didn’t as everyone shapes interpretations with an eye toward the 2028 race). But the blockage itself creates a secondary problem. To the extent that the transmission system fails — to the extent that fifty-eight percent disapproval produces no visible political consequence, or an insufficient one — it allows President Trump to cast his poor standing as the product of a scheme or a plot rather than a genuine national judgment. That claim has no basis in fact or history. But it finds a readier audience among voters shielded from the current political trajectory, voters who never hear the foreman’s verdict read aloud.

1. Again, at the moment, widespread disillusionment does not seem to be likely.