A week after voters took Congress away from his party, President Trump’s standing with the public sits near the lowest point of his career, and the reason voters give is the oldest one in politics: prices.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday found that 32 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance in the White House, unchanged from the two previous Reuters/Ipsos polls in late October and early November. Only 21 percent approve of how he is handling the cost of living. His handling of the economy more broadly gets 25 percent. His strongest major issue remains immigration, at 38 percent, and even that is below water.
The poll was conducted online across the country from November 6 to 9, after the November 3 elections. It gathered responses from 1,705 adults in the United States and carries a margin of error of about two percentage points. It is a survey of opinion taken after the vote, not a measure of the vote itself, and it cannot by itself prove why any voter chose as they did.
What it does show is the shape of the problem the election exposed. In interviews through the fall, voters returned again and again to grocery, housing and energy costs. Senior Republicans, Vice President JD Vance among them, have also blamed the Iran war for the party’s losses. The poll suggests the war is not the only weight: the cost of living number, 21 percent, is the lowest mark the president gets on any major issue in this survey, eleven points below his overall approval.
Trump has responded to the election in two directions at once. On Sunday he told CNN that new attacks on Iran were “highly unlikely” if talks progress, and he told CBS that his deportation policy “might be too tough” and that he could work with Democrats on immigration and even on AI rules. On Monday he questioned whether the election had been honest, a claim we checked in our fact check of his post. The poll numbers describe the hole he is working from: a president at 32 percent, with the new Democratic Congress arriving in January and his own party’s lame duck session now under way.
Transparency note: All figures are from the Reuters/Ipsos poll as reported by Reuters, including its field dates, sample size and margin of error. Subgroup figures and the full questionnaire were not published with the report, so we have not used any.
