The Big Picture

As we have mentioned in previous Trendwatches, Trendency runs a national panel of registered voters who regularly receive questions on a range of topics. While not all questions are political, rating the opinions of the sitting president ranks high in our queue. Like many questions on our Trendency platform, users can respond with nuance—here, allocating 100 points among 3 answer options. We like these questions over a Likert scale or similar method (a binary choice from four or five options), as it allows users to adjust their answers with a subtlety that picking simply disapprove or approve doesn’t provide.

Additionally, it alters the interpretation of the results. Because of the allocation format, the data in the trendline below doesn’t mean that 57% of respondents disapprove of President Trump. Instead, interpret the result to mean that, on average, respondents allocate 57 points toward disapproval. It’s a subtle difference that requires more focus on the ratio between averages versus the one percentage result.

So, what does this initial trendline tell us? Well, for one, Trump isn’t exactly winning the popularity contest here. He may play bully ball with the national press corps on a daily basis, but voters in our panel have been gradually shifting their allocations toward more disapproval throughout the first 200 days of his second term. Indeed, even though he won the election, he started his term underwater. Trump was much more active than many incoming presidents, so perhaps he was already burning some of his goodwill in December and January before Inauguration Day.

A Look Under the Hood

So, the overall picture doesn’t look great for Donald Trump, but the real story is always in the details. America is a diverse country with diverse opinions. In the 2024 election, Trump won with increased support from younger voters (especially men) and the Latino/Hispanic community (also more so from men). Let’s look at how his support has held up among these and other groups:

Starting with age, the trendlines for younger voters tell a very interesting story. Perhaps not totally surprising to those who followed the 2024 election closely, but younger men have remained more amenable to Donald Trump throughout his second term. Both men and women under 45 were giving the president lower marks throughout the spring, but in June shifted somewhat back toward approval. Average disapproval among younger women has since increased back over 60, while for men, values have remained much more split. According to our Trendency data, it appears that Trump has not yet completely lost his, at least mixed, support among younger men.

Latino/Hispanic Opinion

What about the Latino/Hispanic voting bloc? Has Trump managed to maintain his growing support from this community despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric of this campaign and term? Well, umm, just look at the chart below:

There is an important caveat to this chart, which we mentioned earlier. When interpreting these values, look to the ratio between approve and disapprove, not that 59 percent of Latino voters now disapprove of Trump’s job performance. Nonetheless, opinions of Trump have completely flipped since Inauguration Day. He began his term maintaining the goodwill he had gained during the campaign, but that soon drifted away. This summer, however – perhaps as ICE enforcement raids continued across the country – opinion tanked and now sits as a mirror image to that of January 2025.

When we break the trends down by gender, some of the shifts are even more radical:

Among our panel at least, Latina voters were willing to give Trump high marks at the very beginning of this term. By June, Latino/Hispanic men and women shared very similar opinions of the job Trump was doing as president, basically dividing their allocation evenly on average. As summer wears on, women have sharply flipped against Donald Trump, shifting their allocations much more toward disapproval. Men have also moved in a negative direction, but not nearly to the same extent. We will definitely keep track of this down the road as Trump continues his anti-immigrant words and actions.

Trump’s Base

Ok, so Trump has lost at least some support among groups that newly voted for him in 2024, but what about among his base voters? First, let’s take a look at non-college-educated white voters whose party affiliation is either Republican or Independent:

Not surprisingly, this group likes Donald Trump. Job approval at the beginning of his second term was extremely high, with average support in the 70s. Again, thinking about the results in terms of the ratio between answer options, in the winter, the ratio between approval and disapproval was about 4:1 among men and 3:1 among women. Now? It’s closer to 2:1, especially among women. Approval is still receiving much higher levels of allocation from this section of his base, but not quite at the same levels. What about among the actual Trump voters in 2024? Is job approval eroding there as well? In a word: meh.

Yes, job approval among 2024 Trump voters has dipped slightly…down to 83 points on average. That is still a 10:1 ratio of approval to disapproval.

Conclusion

It is still (relatively) early in the second Trump presidency, but probably not too early to make some initial conclusions. Trump has clearly lost support from Latino/Hispanic voters. Any goodwill that was gained during the 2024 campaign season has drastically dropped this summer. While there are gender differences in this voting bloc (as there are among almost all sub-groups), Latino/Hispanic men have flipped their opinion on Trump as well. It’s hard to see Trump reversing course here as long as he continues with his ICE raids and harsh anti-immigrant actions.

Younger men, however, are still holding on to their mixed views of Trump. While they drifted away from him this spring, this summer, approval has increased. There is none of the dramatic movement that we see in the Latino/Hispanic community.

In sum, Donald Trump is not a popular president at the moment. For reference, in our Trendency panel back in 2020, he ended his first term with average ratings of 38% approval, 55% disapproval, and 5% indifference. So, he is faring slightly worse already, even without a mismanaged global pandemic to ruin the economy. If the Trump tariffs have the expected long-term effects on the economy that many think, look out.