Trump's approval falls to 37% in final Emerson poll before the midterms
President Donald Trump's approval rating has dropped to 37% in Emerson College Polling's final national survey before the midterm elections, his lowest mark in the pollster's tracking, while Democrats lead Republicans by 10 points on the generic congressional ballot.
President Donald Trump's approval rating has fallen to 37% in Emerson College Polling's final national survey before the midterm elections, the lowest figure he has recorded in the pollster's tracking and a two-point drop from his previous low of 39%, which he had registered in its September, July, June and May surveys.
The same survey puts the generic Democratic congressional candidate ahead of the Republican by 10 points, 52% to 42%, days before voters go to the polls on Tuesday, 3 November, in an election that will decide control of Congress for the final two years of Trump's term.
Emerson College Polling conducted the national survey among 1,000 likely voters between 24 and 26 October, using a probability-based panel contacted by text-to-web methods, with a credibility interval of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The pollster published the results on Friday, 30 October.
Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said the president now carries a net 20-point disapproval rating, at 37% approval against 57% disapproval. He noted that when tracking began about 15 months ago, Republican support stood at the same 42% level, while Trump's approval was split at 46% to 47%.
Kimball also pointed to the roughly 5% of voters who remain undecided, most of them independents, about half of whom disapprove of Trump, saying the Democrats' congressional ceiling could be higher than the poll reports.
Other polling averages point in the same direction. As of Friday, the RealClearPolitics average showed Trump at 38.4% approval and 59.7% disapproval, the New York Times average put him at 37% approval and 60% disapproval, and Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin average showed 37.3% approval against 59.9% disapproval.
The numbers land at the end of a frantic final week of campaigning. Trump has held more than two dozen rallies in the closing stretch, and on Friday he was due to campaign in Daytona Beach, Florida, after a week in which planned rallies in Kansas and Iowa were first cancelled and then, according to reports on Friday, put back on.
Kansas has become an unexpected battleground. Emerson's final Kansas survey, conducted from 26 to 28 October among 800 likely voters, found Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton leading Republican incumbent Roger Marshall by 49% to 45%, in a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932. A separate Washington Post poll put Hamilton nine points ahead.
More than 44 million Americans had already voted by Thursday evening, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab, close to the total turnout of the 2022 midterms, with both parties now fighting over the remaining undecided and lower-turnout voters.
What happens next will be decided on Tuesday. If the polling lead holds and Democrats retake the House, the president would face a far more hostile Congress for the rest of his term; if Republicans defy the polls and hold both chambers, the result would instead be read as a vindication of his closing campaign. Either way, the Emerson figures confirm that Trump enters election week as the least popular he has been in this pollster's tracking.
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