US President Donald Trump's approval rating remains low but stable, according to a poll. Photo / Getty Images
United States President Donald Trump’s efforts to send National Guard troops to big cities, punish media organisations and pressure universities and private businesses are all unpopular with voters.
But the continued torrent of policies and tactics has not further weakened Trump’s overall standing, according to a new poll from the New York Times and Siena University.
Instead, Trump continues to retain the support of roughly nine out of 10 Republican voters.
The net result: an unpopular president with an unchanged approval rating of 43%.
At the start of his term, Trump’s approval rating fell from its post-election highs, and it remains weak compared with his predecessors at this point in their presidencies.
Yet over the last several months, his rating has been resilient and stable, reflecting that most voters’ opinions on him have hardened.
The new poll comes as the federal Government is racing towards a shutdown today, an impasse that has political risks for both Trump and congressional Democrats.
Voters said they would be likeliest to blame both sides if the Government shuts down. Independent voters said they were twice as likely to assign blame to Trump and Republicans than to Democrats.
At the same time, two-thirds of voters warned that Democrats should not shut down the Government if their demands are not met.
“It’s like a street gang fight,” Alvaro Olivares Rivera, 40, a veteran who lives in Loveland, Colorado, and relies on the Department of Veterans Affairs for disability care, said of the fight between the two parties.
“They are being very careless about shutting down the Government and are not willing to meet in the middle.”
Olivares Rivera said his values are closer to the Republican Party’s but that the Trump Administration’s deportation policy had him leaning Democratic. “We are a country in pain and in need, and both sides need to work together,” he added.
However, the Democratic base is primed for a fight. More Democratic voters, 47%, said the party should shut down the Government if their demands were not met than said they should not (43%).
Even before a potential shutdown, faith that America’s political system can still solve the country’s problems has faded to a bleak 33%.
The outlook from Independents on that question was as dim as from Democrats.
In many ways, the latest Times/Siena poll reveals the contradictions that have come to define a deeply divided American electorate.
Republicans are increasingly giving Trump credit for making the economy better — 67% said so now, compared with 47% in April.
At the same time, the broader electorate’s views on the nation’s economic conditions are still sour.
Only 26% said the conditions were even good, though that low level represents a slight uptick from 22% in the last Times/Siena poll in April.
An open-ended question asking voters to identify the “most important problem” facing the country was even more revealing.
The top issue that Democratic voters, 18% of them, identified was Trump and Republicans — more than those who said they were chiefly concerned with the economy.
Nearly as many Republicans, 16%, said Democrats were the nation’s biggest problem.
And Independents? Their top concern was polarisation and division.
Laurie Maravich, a Democrat, said she was worried about Trump’s impact on society.
“He can say any ugly thing he wants to about anybody, but if anyone criticises anything remotely related to him, he wants to silence them or deport them,” said Maravich, 63, a director of global procurement in Denver, North Carolina. “He threatens and bullies people to do what he wants.”
There has been a remarkable run of news and developments since the last Times/Siena poll.
Congress has passed Trump’s signature Bill that will cut taxes and make significant cuts to Medicaid. He has imposed, paused and reimposed market-upending tariffs.
He has moved to consolidate power over once-independent American institutions, including the Federal Reserve, and pressured universities to change policies.
He has deployed National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities, and he has pushed federal officials to investigate and prosecute his political enemies.
But on issue after issue, opinions on Trump are so hardened as to seem almost immovable in either direction.
Voter opinions did not shift beyond the margin of error on the President’s handling of immigration, the economy, trade with other countries, the war between Russia and Ukraine or his management of the federal Government.
At the same time, voters repeatedly said Trump had “gone too far” in a number of his pursuits.
For instance, 53% of voters said Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops into cities went too far compared with only 33% who said it had “been about right”.
Similar shares said the same about pressuring colleges and universities to adopt new policies, pressuring businesses to make specific decisions, and Trump’s action on immigration enforcement.
More than 60% of voters — including one-quarter of Republicans — were worried that Trump had pushed things too far in pressuring media organisations who cover him unfavourably.
Seventy per cent of voters aged under-45 and Independents said Trump had gone too far in cracking down on media companies.
Trump’s decisions around media organisations proved to be among the most unpopular in the survey.
More than half of Republicans — 57% — and 77% of voters overall opposed the idea of revoking licences for television stations that criticise Trump.
“I’m a big believer in free speech,” said Isaiah Moreno, 25, who is from Pueblo, Colorado, works at a truck dealership and voted for Trump in 2024 mainly because of the economy.
“Anyone should be able to say what they have on their mind, and I don’t think they should be reprimanded for that.”
More voters (51%) said they were concerned that Trump could use the National Guard to intimidate political rivals than the share who said they were worried about crime in big cities without the Guard’s intervention (42%).
Yet on the big-picture question — whether Trump is exceeding the powers available to him — opinion remained a flat 54% who said he was exceeding his authority, both in April and today.
The Republican base, in particular, is embracing Trump’s exercise of power.
Take the issue of whether independent government agencies should make their own policies. Voters overall said that they should, 63% to 29%. Yet Republicans said the polar opposite, with 59% saying the President should be able to overrule those agencies.
On other issues, the survey reveals a complicated dynamic in voters’ views of Trump’s policies.
In many cases the policies are somewhat popular, even as voters question his Administration’s implementation of them.
The President, for instance, received his highest approval ratings in the survey on handling crime (48% approval to 47% disapproval). Yet voters opposed Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, DC, by nearly 10%.
“It is a solution, but I wish it was less forceful,” said Devin Sullivan, 29, an Independent in Charlotte, North Carolina, who leans Republican but does not align with a party, though he supports Trump’s approach on crime.
It was a similar story for immigration.
A 51% majority said the Government was mostly deporting people who “should be deported”. And 54% of voters said they supported deporting immigrants living in the US illegally — including nearly 20% of Democrats.
At the same time, a slim majority of voters said the Trump Administration’s process for deportation had mostly been unfair, and a majority thought Trump had gone too far on immigration enforcement.
Perhaps the brightest spot in the survey for Trump was his solidifying support among Republicans on the economy even as voters overall are dubious of his economic stewardship.
About half of Republicans, 51%, now say Trump’s policies have helped them personally, up from 36% in April. And 32% of voters overall now say he has improved the economy, up from 21% in April.
The figure remains low overall because Independents believe by a 20-point margin that Trump has made matters worse.
The hypothetical match-up between Democrats and Republicans in the 2026 Midterm elections is also unchanged.
Both in April and September, 47% of voters said they would prefer to vote for a Democrat next year — slightly more than those who said they would prefer a Republican.
Here are the key things to know about this poll from the New York Times and Siena University:
— The survey was conducted among 1313 registered voters nationwide from September 22-27.
— This poll was conducted in English and Spanish, by telephone using live interviewers and by text message. Overall, 99% of respondents were contacted on their cellphones.
— Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing pollsters to make sure they reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For this poll, interviewers placed more than 152,000 calls or texts to more than 56,000 voters.
— To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, pollsters give more weight to respondents from demographic groups that are underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree.
— The margin of sampling error among the electorate that is likely to vote is about plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shane Goldmacher and Ruth Igielnik
Photographs by: Getty Images, Victor J. Blue
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