U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 25, 2025. REUTERS Nathan Howard
Intelligencer writer Ed Kilgore says just being unpopular isn’t the thing that’s blowing up President Donald Trump’s approval and setting up Republicans for a mass ejection from the House and maybe the Senate in November.
Trump made some very big boasts on his way to the 2024 election about how much winning was going to be underway when he stepped back into the White House. He made them loud — and now most every disgruntled voter remembers those broken promises.
“The single most important measurable variable affecting the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections is likely the president’s job-approval ratings, which have been slowly but surely achieving new second-term lows for months now,” said Kilgore. “But being generally unpopular probably isn’t Donald Trump’s (or his party’s) biggest problem. When you dig into polling on assessments of presidential performance on particular issues of concern, one jumps right off the page and kicks the GOP like a donkey: Trump’s handling of living costs and/or inflation.
Trump’s approval on most every topic has hit the landfill, said Kilgore, “but far worse is the hole he’s in on inflation (net approval of minus 45.4 percent).”
When compared with Trump’s overall net job-approval average of minus 19.1 percent, Trump’s popularity drag becomes obvious, said Kilgore, while adding that the numbers may underestimate the real impact that unhappiness is having on living costs, which not only ranks at the top of voter concerns in almost every survey, it also “bleeds over into” voters’ negative feelings about the war, which is directly whacking energy costs.
An Economist-YouGov survey reveals only 18 percent of respondents approve of how Trump is handling inflation. And this thing is going to stick on him like it did on his predecessor.
“This is the issue, more than any other, that doomed Joe Biden’s running-mate Kamala Harris in 2024; a lot of voters appear to have bought Trump’s promise that he would lower living costs — not just reduce inflation but return prices to pre-pandemic levels. It’s boomeranging on him and his party right now,” said Kilgore. “To put it bluntly, if Trump wants to get his overall job-approval numbers out of the 30s before November — and he really needs to do so to give his party a fighting chance — he has to get his job-approval numbers on handling living costs out of the 20s or it will be too heavy a lift.
Kilgore points out that Democrats learned in 2024 that rationalizations about inflation being temporary or a sign that prosperity’s around the corner definitely does not work with voters, and Republicans may be learning the same lesson right now.
“But until their maximum leader gets it, it’s the anchor that is likely to drag them down to defeat in 2026 and perhaps beyond,” Kilgore said.
