Bad news for Trump as voters in battleground states sour on GOP

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks to the media on the day of a NATO leaders' summit in Ankara, Turkey, July 8, 2026.

A new survey shows that President Donald Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high in battleground states, with nearly three in five voters disapproving of his handling of the presidency. The survey also showed that voters in battleground states rate the economy poorly and disapprove of his handling of it, with independents in particular showing a dramatic shift toward disapproval.

The survey not only found that battleground states have soured on the economy, but that they disapprove of the economic situation more than safely blue or red states “by a wide margin.” In the year since Republicans passed Trump’s much vaunted Big Beautiful Bill budget, the overall rating of the economy has dropped by an average of seven points in battleground states.

The shift was driven largely by independent voters — the most essential bloc for a candidate looking to win toss-up states. Before the Big Beautiful Bill passed, independents were already underwater on the economy by -42 points. That has plunged to -65 points since then. At the same time, named GOP incumbents have gone from +6 to -30 with independents. And even among battleground Republicans, the approval rating has plummeted by 11 points.

This is bad news for Trump and the GOP, who face severe headwinds going into the midterm elections then the 2028 presidential election. Disapproval of Trump and the Republicans’ handling of the economy, the war with Iran, brutal deportation tactics, and the mishandling of the Epstein files have soured independents, and analysts project that the GOP will lose its majority in the House and is vulnerable to doing the same in the Senate. If the survey holds true, it not only suggests that the Republican Party will take major losses in the midterms, but that it is badly positioned for whoever ends up being its candidate in two years.

In response to the GOP’s electoral woes, Trump has been ramping up his demands for the passage of a voter ID law that critics say would disenfranchise millions of voters. He has fired all the members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission tasked with overseeing election processes. And he has raised the volume on his claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and on Thursday will deliver a prime time address in which he is expected to declare its outcome illegitimate — a move that experts warn is an outright move toward authoritarianism.

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