Donald Trump and Melania Trump with Senate Majority Leader John Thune on January 8, 2025 (Wikimedia Commons)
President Donald Trump's decline among his own supporters continues to grow, and one analyst thinks it's a larger indicator of where Republicans are as a whole in 2026.
Newsweek reported on Friday that, based on data from a national polling series, Trump is underwater.
According to the report, the data "signals a measurable softening in GOP support over just more than three months, as overall approval numbers also trended lower in multiple national surveys."
It's still a long time until the 2026 election, giving Republicans ample opportunity to turn things around. But it could require changes that they don't appear willing to make.
Newsweek said that it wouldn't characterize the slump as a complete "collapse," but noted that the slide downward began in the fall, not over the past few months.
"Republican net approval (the percentage of those who approved minus those who disapproved) of Trump’s job performance dropped from a +90-point rating in October to a +76-point rating in early February, according to two Quinnipiac University national polls," the report detailed.
Newsweek compared apples to apples: the October Quinnipiac poll and the recent Quinnipiac poll, released this week. What the report found is that Trump trails by eight points among his own loyalists so far. He still enjoys a huge amount of support among Republicans, but in an election where the president has already alienated so many independent voters, he can't afford to also lose members of his own party.
For the past decade, the report explained, Trump's most accurate indicator of general polling was whether he could maintain his own loyalists. Losing any movement among MAGA means it's cratering elsewhere.
"Movement of this scale, even from an already‑high starting point, is notable because GOP approval has traditionally been resistant to short‑term shocks," the analysis continued.
