What Has Pulled Down Donald Trump's Approval?

Nate Silver says Donald Trump's approval in the second term tracks gas prices. It moves with prices and with economic anxiety, it dropped sharply around Liberation Day in April 2025 when tariffs scared people, and the rest of the fall has been fairly steady. Trump is 80, and he has been the central figure in American politics since the middle of 2015, so fatigue is part of the decline too.

That decline is why the Senate is in play. Ezra Klein said Democrats would not be favored to win the Senate if Trump had not gone to war with Iran and pushed gasoline into the mid-$4 range, higher in California. In the first term, a good economy worked as a halo. Paychecks, jobs, a rising stock market, and rising home values let voters treat arguments about democracy and immigration as noise. With those gains in doubt, the culture-war case sounds desperate, and the first-term lesson that a strong economy would cover the rest no longer fits.