Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm opening up Crossplay. I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times. Kat's played another move. Oh, she played stoop for 36 points. I've got a Z, which is 10 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see.
Tanga is a word. Oh. Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close, but I did win.
Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today.
It's devastating when you see a game that you could have won. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
A major new poll from The Times suggests that despite his seemingly unchecked power over the federal government and his own party, President Trump's national support is crumbling to record lows, and Democrats are now poised to win back many of the key voters who made Trump president in 2024.
Today, Chief Political Analyst Nate Cohn walks us through the polls' results and what they mean for this fall's midterm elections and the future of both parties. It's Friday, May 22nd. Hi, Nate. Hello. How are you? I'm great. That was such an enthusiastic greeting.
I had enough coffee, I guess.
Well, I'm glad to have you in such high energetic caffeinated spirits.
Well, it'll fade quickly, I promise.
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Chapter 2: What does the latest poll reveal about Trump's national support?
for a second time in tatters. The young and non-white voters who swung to President Trump in 2024 haven't just swung back towards the Democrats. They've now swung even farther toward the left than they were in 2020 when he lost the first time.
Right, we'll get to that. Fascinating.
And it appears to leave the Democrats in an increasingly strong position heading into the midterm elections. And that's not necessarily surprising on one level. The party out of power usually does well in the midterms. But this poll suggests they could do really, really well this November.
Gotcha. I want to talk through each of these one by one. And let's start with the president's record low approval rating that this poll found. Because it feels like it changed our understanding of something that felt very well established in the Trump era.
That's right. For as long as Donald Trump has been president, it's been commonly said that there is a high floor on his support. Just explain that, just define that. The idea is that Donald Trump can do all kinds of things that might ordinarily hurt a president politically, but that his base of support is so strong that his ratings can never fall that low.
And historically, that floor has been around 38%. If you just look over his whole time as president, there have only been a handful of days where his approval rating on average has fallen beneath 38%. Right.
As Donald Trump would say, he could walk out on Fifth Avenue and do something quite untoward, and 38% of Americans would still support him.
That's the basic idea. So our poll this week shows President Trump's approval rating at 37%. It's not necessarily hugely different from 38%. Of course, that's a four point decline, though, since our last poll in January. And it's part of a broader decline in the president's approval rating over the last year.
So at best, we're looking at the president now having fallen to that floor and we're wondering whether he's going to keep falling. And at worst, I think you can look at this poll and see all kinds of signs that the president's really falling through a level that he hasn't fallen before. And we have no reason to assume that he can't fall any further.
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Chapter 3: How does Trump's approval rating compare to previous polls?
And in fact, a majority of 18 to 44-year-olds in the poll want to see the next Republican president take the party in a new direction, and a majority of non-white Republicans want to see the next presidential candidate take the party in a new direction, and they say so by wide two-to-one margins.
On the issues, it seems pretty clear that the cost of living and foreign policy are crucial points of discontent. So this is a very different kind of opposition to Donald Trump than the one that you might remember from the so-called never Trumpers back in 2016, who opposed Donald Trump because he was an isolationist and opposed free trade and opposed comprehensive immigration reform.
This new kind of dissatisfaction from young and nonwhite Republicans is in many cases because he hasn't necessarily followed through with his promise to put America first, as he would put it.
Right. Instead, he has gone from being an isolationist back in 2016 to becoming an interventionist and starting the very kind of war in the Middle East that he very successfully lured young non-white voters to the Republican Party by saying he would never pursue.
That's right. And again, the generational divide here is really stark. On all of the foreign policy issues – Young Republicans under age 44, they line up against him and often by wide two to one or more margins. I'll also note, by the way, that that includes the question of Republican support for Israel.
A majority of young Republicans think that Donald Trump is too supportive of Israel and disapprove of his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So that's very different from what we've seen before from Republicans. And I will say that it happens to echo something we have seen in the elite discourse among Republicans.
We've seen prominent podcasters like Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan or even Nick Fuentes take these positions on Israel and Trump's foreign policy that we can see echoed in public opinion among younger Republicans.
Nate, we're spending a lot of time talking about divisions within these two parties and this key group of voters, especially young non-white voters, what message from either party could bring them in. But it occurs to me, based on past conversations I've had with you over the years, that that conversation might not be hugely relevant if we have a president whose approval numbers are this low.
And those numbers, as you said earlier, might continue to fall. Am I right in thinking that?
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