Bullshitting is a better campaign strategy than governing strategy

Trump has successfully led a much more radical administration than his first term, and voters don’t like it:

President Donald Trump’s approval rating fell to 38%, the lowest since his return to power, with Americans unhappy about his handling of the high cost of living and the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

The four-day poll, which concluded on Monday, comes as Trump’s grip on his Republican Party shows signs of weakening. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a measure to force the release of Justice Department files on Epstein. Trump had opposed the move for months while one of his closest supporters in Congress, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, turned into a harsh critic over his resistance. Trump reversed his position on Sunday as lawmakers prepared to move forward without him.

The survey showed Trump’s overall approval has fallen two percentage points since a Reuters/Ipsos poll in early November.

The poll, which was conducted online, surveyed 1,017 U.S. adults nationwide and had a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.

Trump started his second term in office with 47% of Americans giving him a thumbs up. The nine-point decline since January leaves his overall popularity near the lows seen during his first term in office, and close to the weakest ratings for his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden. Biden’s approval rating sank as low as 35% while Trump’s first-term popularity fell as low as 33%.

A critical number of marginal voters bought Trump’s narrative that the primary effect of his re-election would be the economic conditions of 2019, especially on prices, hence the early positive-by-Trump-standards vibes. That’s gone now, and since the negative effects of the BBBA (most notably exploding healthcare premiums) haven’t even kicked in yet I don’t see the trajectory heading upward.

And assumptions that 2024 represented a fundamental realignment of American politics were also highly premature:

Those are the worst numbers we’ve ever seen for Republicans in any of our four released surveys, and they raise the obvious question: What’s happening here?

Republicans are hemorrhaging support with the young, nonwhite, and disengaged voters who powered Trump’s victory in 2024. Here are a few tidbits to show just what I’m talking about:

• Democrats are winning 25% of nonwhite Trump 2024 voters. Among white voters, this number is just 4%.
• Among registered voters who didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump in 2024, Democrats receive 62% of the vote — a 25-percentage-point lead. Among the white voters of this group, Democrats lead by two points; among nonwhite nonvoters, they lead by 48 points.
• Democrats win 64% of young voters in our survey, for a lead of 28 points. (For context, in 2024, they won this group by just 10 points.)

As with any survey, there are margins of error associated with these results. But when the findings are this lopsided, and when they line up with the election results we just saw, I feel more comfortable concluding that there is a clear and consistent story being told here.

In New Jersey, for instance, exit polls suggest that Mikie Sherrill won 18% of nonwhite Trump 2024 voters, while winning just 5% of white Trump 2024 voters. Among those who didn’t back either Harris or Trump in 2024, she received 64% of the vote. And she won young voters by 38 percentage points which placed them 24 points more Democratic than the 2024 electorate at large. All of these figures are quite similar to the findings from our survey.

Special elections and off-year elections are usually low-turnout, but in both New Jersey and Virginia, the gubernatorial race had a higher number of votes cast than the 2022 midterm elections did. In other words, this isn’t just a story of Democrats dominating in a low-turnout environment. It likely has real implications for the midterms.

As I’ve said before, Trump convinced more than a few marginal, low-information voters that his immigration policies were Biden’s policies, but you can’t maintain that illusion while doing extremely high profile internal enforcement actions targeting ordinary workers (many of them citizens or legal residents.)

This is a consistent theme. Flatly lying about Project 2025 (with a lot of the political media’s active support) was bluntly effective, but it doesn’t continue to work when your administration is just Project 2025, with some news cycles about your attempts to cover up information about your relationship with a famous sex criminal on the side.