America Hates Donald Trump. The worst polling in history tells the story.

by Rick Wilson - Aug 3

When I tell you America hates Donald Trump, I’m not speaking as a pundit or a partisan, and I’m justnot merel trolling him, as much fun as that can be.

No, I’m telling you this as a man who has commissioned millions of dollars in polling over a 40-year run in politics and corporate communications.

When I tell you America hates him, I’m telling you this as a man who spent a lifetime studying public opinion to shape political nd strategic messaging.

I spent decades in the business of reading polls the way a surgeon reads an X-ray, and I’m going to tell you what the July numbers actually say, without the mush-mouthed hedging of cable-news panelists who need Trump to stay competitive and keep praying for some deus ex douchebag move that keeps the show going.

America hates Donald Trump.

Not “disapproves of.” Not “has concerns about.”

Hates.

There’s a technical distinction in survey research between soft disapproval and contempt, and Trump has crossed it. In Nate Silver’s average at the end of July, Trump sat at 38.2 percent approval and 58.8 percent disapproval, a net of minus 20.6, the worst of his second term. Worse, in fact, than any moment of his first term, including the days after January 6th, when he bottomed out at minus 19. Donald Trump is now less popular than he was while the gallows were still standing on the Mall and his terrorists were hunting Mike Pence.

And here’s the number soon to be engraved on the career tombstone of every Republican consultant still telling clients to toe the Trump line: 21 percent of Americans strongly approve of the job he’s doing.

One in five. That’s the Trumphadi base. That’s a cult remnant, a rump of true believers rattling around a country that has judged this crapulous trainwreck of a President in full.

AP-NORC has him at 33 percent—eight points below where he stood in July of his first term. Three points below Joe Biden in July 2022, which, you’ll recall, was the number Republicans spent two years waving around as proof of a failed presidency. Trump is now underwater against the standard his own party set for failure.

The trendlines are a damning indictment. He was at minus 16.4 on July 12. Minus 20.6 by month’s end. This is a picture of constant, unstoppable erosion, and no matter how much Fox News his followers inhale, it’s not getting better.

The NYT chart below aggregates polls across the second term. No amount of curve-smoothing shows Trump’s approval going anywhere but down.

Why?

Well, it’s tempting but lazy to say, “Everything.”

Start with Iran, the war Trump launched in February and has spent five months losing.

AP-NORC finds 64 percent of Americans say the war has not been worth fighting. Reuters/Ipsos puts the approval rating for the strikes at 33 percent. Fox News, his own network’s polling, has disapproval of his handling of Iran at 66 percent, a record, with 56 percent of voters opposing the military action outright. At the end of the Vietnam War, with choppers lifting off the roof of the embassy, roughly 30 percent of Americans still backed the fight, and that was after 58,000 dead. Five months in, Trump’s war is polling at fall-of-Saigon levels.

But the number that should keep the White House up at night is this one: nearly 70 percent of Americans say Trump has never clearly explained what we’re doing there.

Of course, he hasn’t. There is no explanation other than his manifold pathologies and idiocy. There is only escalation, improvisation, and a Pentagon casualty tracking system playing games with the lives of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

And the base is cracking. Republican approval of his handling of Iran fell from 71 percent in June to 61 percent in July—ten points in a month, among his own voters, on a war he owns completely. I made ads for a living. You cannot spin a war that two-thirds of the country thinks was a mistake, and the commander-in-chief cannot describe.

The war hurts him. The economy wrecks him.

Remember the screams of rage over gas prices in Biden’s term?

Trump’s net approval on gasoline prices in Marquette’s polling is now minus 62. Minus sixty-two, on gas prices, from the party that printed “drill baby drill” on trucker hats.

Trump’s war keeps oil prices elevated, which drives up electricity and food prices, landing on families already tapping credit cards and savings to cover groceries. Sixty-five percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy. A Harris poll found a staggering 95 percent of Americans believe the country is in an affordability crisis.

You can’t get 95 percent of Americans to agree that the sky is blue.

The tariffs made it worse, then the courts struck them down, then he imposed new ones anyway, because the one constant of Trumpism is that no bad idea ever dies; it just gets a new legal theory. Voters noticed. They blame him. And unlike 2017, there is no Obama economy to coast on and no Biden to scapegoat. This one has its stink all over it.

Immigration was always his secret sauce, the white rural and suburban dog whistle of Haitian cat-eating and Mexican caravanning to scare the normies into submission. It was his Paramus Mall, his safe space, his polling woobie.

CBS/YouGov has 56 percent disapproving of his immigration pogroms, a ten-point collapse since February. The mass deportation program is now net-negative, with independents opposing it 59 to 41. Marquette shows him underwater on both immigration and another former crown jewel in his arsenal: border security.

When Americans watched masked agents kill Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and watched as, over the summer, the violence picked up again, something changed.

The pernicious influence of Stephen Miller is at work here. When a politician loses his worst issues, he has a messaging problem. When he loses his best issues, he has a voter problem, and the Trump Administration lacks both the time and the self-awareness to address it.

If you’re a Republican member of Congress reading this from what you think is a safe seat, I have some news for you: there are no safe seats at these numbers.

The special elections are a flashing red siren.

Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats since Trump’s reelection. Republicans have flipped zero. Not a few. Zero.

Democrats are overperforming their 2024 presidential margins by an average of 11 points, and the individual results are the stuff of NRCC night terrors: a Democrat winning a Texas Senate district Trump carried by 17 points, a Democrat taking 62 percent in a Louisiana district Trump won by 13.

The generic ballot is another blEmerson has Democrats up 11 among likely voters, 53 to 42. CNN has them up 8. The averages sit around D+6, and here’s the operative’s footnote: every one of those numbers understates the danger, because the gap between registered voters and people who will actually show up is where Republican careers go to die this cycle.

Which brings us to intensity. Democrats hold a 10-point enthusiasm advantage in the Washington Post-Ipsos poll, 8 points larger than in 2018, a year Democrats flipped 40 House seats. Among voters certain to turn out, the Democratic lead grows to 8. Among CNN’s “extremely motivated” voters, it’s 20. Democratic primary turnout is running nearly three times the pace of 2022. And 81 percent of Democrats say their midterm vote is a vote against Trump.

I’ve run midterm campaigns on both sides of these environments. In 2006, we couldn’t save ourselves no matter how clever our messaging. In 2010, we couldn’t lose even with a slate of nutjobs. When your president is at 38 percent, and the other side’s voters are this hungry, you don’t message your way out.

You lose. The only question is the body count.

Presidential approval in a midterm year isn’t one variable among many. It’s the strongest variable in the model, with the economy right behind it, and we know how that’s going for the GOP.

Yes, redistricting chicanery has helped the GOP, but it’s not enough. Bush was at 38 percent in the summer of 2006; Democrats took 31 seats and the House. Trump’s first midterm delivered a 40-seat Democratic wave of numbers better than these. In 2010 and 2014, the generic ballot looked close, but the enthusiasm edge told the real story, and the enthusiasm edge was right both times. In July 2018, the ballot and enthusiasm pointed in the same direction, and they called the November result almost to the decimal point. In July 2026, they pointed in the same direction again at Republicans’ throats.

And congressional Republicans made a fatal trategic choice: they never separated from him, not on Iran, not on tariffs, not on ICE. They lashed themselves to the mast of a sinking ship and called it loyalty. When he goes down, and the numbers say he’s going down, he takes the whole crew with him.

Fox News polling, Rupert’s own shop, finds Democrats with their largest lead on economic trust since 2006. Twenty years. A conservative outfit, Napolitan News, has Democrats up 7 on both the economy and inflation, a complete reversal from the GOP’s 8-point advantage barely a year ago. For the first time since 2010, Democrats out-poll Republicans on the economy, and Trump did that.

Long after voters forgot the platform fights, the GOP’s brand rested on a single promise: we’re the party that’s good for the economy.

Ronald Reagan built it. Fifty years of consultants, myself once among them, sold it. Donald Trump strapped it to a tariff war, an oil shock, and a cash-and-carry kleptocracy and burned it to the waterline in eighteen months.

Parties can survive losing elections. They do not easily survive losing their reason for existing, and Trump is their reason for existing today.

So no, this isn’t a slump, and it won’t be fixed by a staff shakeup, a Truth Social tantrum, one more rally in front of the faithful remnant, or even Elon Musk splooging $100 billion into campaigns.

America has watched the war, paid the price at the pump and the grocery store, witnessed the opera buffa corruption, seen the masked agents killing their neighbors, and made up its mind.

America hates Donald Trump.

In November, it gets to say so out loud.