President Donald Trump’s approval rating took a nosedive this week, with multiple high-quality polls showing Trump in the low 30% range—the floor of support for presidents in the highly politically polarized climate in which we live.The Associated Press on Thursday released a poll showing Trump at 33%, while on Wednesday both CNN and Quinnipiac released surveys showing Trump at 34% and 32%, respectively.
Those numbers mark all-time lows those pollsters recorded in either Trump term. And they are so low that it means even Republican voters are turning against Trump—something that never happened in his first term and which saved the GOP from seeing even worse midterm losses in 2018 than they experienced.
Indeed, the most recent spate of polling puts Trump in former President George W. Bush territory from his second term, when opposition to the Iraq War was growing and the financial crisis was starting to take hold.
“George W. Bush left office with a 32% approval rating. That was enough to cost Republicans two Prez elections, but more importantly left the party so weak that Trump was able to hijack it and turn it into something completely different. I want to see Trump at 32%. The Bush line,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has made it her mission to defeat Trump and Trumpism, wrote in March, when Trump’s approval began to really decline.
After this latest spate of polling came out, Longwell declared that Trump had reached that destination.
“That, my friends, is the Bush Line,” Longwell wrote in a post on X after the Quinnipiac survey dropped.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the Dubya days will know that there are still deeper troughs to wallow in, but this is a good start. I always had something between faith and hope that Trump would at least get down below 35%. He’s not quite there in the polling averages, but there’s still time. I’m more interested in Trump’s approval rating in Texas, and while there’s a range of outcomes, they’re all well into negative territory. That’s nothing but good news from our perspective.
There’s also more than one way to measure this.
Over the last decade, thanks to The Downballot’s pioneering work, special elections have emerged as a critical tool for assessing which way the electoral winds are blowing.
And just like the weather, special elections vary a great deal while still having an underlying pattern. Just as with climate change, a single major storm means little, but a sustained shift can tell you something powerful.
We are looking for both shifts and their underlying causes. Occasionally, both are detectable by keen observers, as we saw in 2022. But more often, they can be much more difficult, if not impossible, to discern—at least, by the naked eye.
With a little help from some statistical tools, however, we can uncover the patterns that animate special elections. It turns out, these elections are much more than just an ongoing referendum on who’s in power. Rather, they reflect how voters respond to events more broadly.
Most important of all, with our statistical toolkit, we can determine when new events have begun impacting the electorate. Identifying these moments may allow us to figure out what’s driving voters—and when the competitive landscape has changed.
Thanks to The Downballot’s rich data tracking special elections over the last decade, we can identify seven distinct moments that marked pivot points in the political landscape. Armed with this information, we can now be on the lookout for similar inflections that are lurking just over the horizon.
What follows is a nerdy look at how special election results can both give you a more nuanced picture of how the electorate is performing, and also a very early warning siren for shifts in the public mood. Over the course of the two Trump terms, the top quartile performance for Democratic candidates in special elections is at least a 20-point shift in the blue direction. Taylor Rehmet’s win in SD09 is roughly there. The median overperformance is plus ten points. There’s a broad range here, with Ron Angeletti’s slight underperformance in SD04 falling into the bottom quartile. But significant shifts, the kind where you’d say to yourself “whoa, I never thought that could happen in that race”, are more common than you might think.
