People

• Trump began his second term by matching a record-high 52% approval from March 2017, but voters soured on his job performance during the most disruptive part of his trade war, and despite a recent rebound, he’s yet to return to a net positive approval rating.
• At a similar point in Trump’s first term, 44% of voters approved and 52% disapproved of his job performance, leaving his net approval rating today only slightly higher than it was at the same time in 2017.

• Trump’s favorability ratings remain underwater, which has been the case more often than not since he took office.
• Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) face low awareness from the electorate.
• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the most high-profile congressional leader, is also the most unpopular one, though he’s maintained good numbers at home in New York.

Policy

• Voters are most likely to want Trump to focus on lowering prices for goods and services, and specifically health care affordability, following a campaign that was dominated by voters’ concerns about inflation.
• As Trump works to elevate the immigration issue, there’s been only a slight uptick in the shares of voters who say he should make mass deportations or stopping illegal immigration a “top priority,” which are far less important to voters than the affordability issues.

• The president receives his best ratings on immigration (51%) and national security (49%). 
• Nearly half of voters (48%) disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy and taxes, ranking them among his highest issue-specific disapproval ratings, surpassed only by abortion,, health care and the two major entitlement programs.

• Republicans hold significant advantages over Democrats on trust to handle just one issue: immigration.
• Voters are significantly more likely to trust Democrats to handle LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, Medicare and Social Security, health care and energy.
• Voters are closely divided over whom they trust to handle the economy, taxes, trade, the national debt, foreign policy and national security.

News

• Voters are 22 points more likely to say they’ve heard something negative about Trump than positive, (52% to 29%).
• Few voters say they’ve heard much about Johnson or Thune as the two work with Trump to pass the party’s signature legislative package.
• Though Republicans enjoyed a narrow buzz advantage over Democrats between the November elections and the opening months of the second Trump presidency, that hasn’t been the case since late March.

• Voters are 20 points more likely to hear something negative than positive about the economy, a 12-point improvement since late April.
• As was the case throughout much of the 2024 campaign, immigration has been one of the most salient issues voters are hearing about in the news, with 3 in 4 saying they'd heard something recently about it in our latest survey, the most since early February.

• Four in 5 voters said they had recently seen, read or heard at least something about the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, far more than the 3 in 5 who said the same of the U.S.-China framework agreement to reduce trade restrictions.
• Roughly a quarter of voters (24%) said they’d heard “a lot” about Elon Musk’s apology to Trump for highly public criticisms earlier this month, making them much less salient than the 41% who said they’d heard the same of the billionaire’s initial hits on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Republicans were 10 points less likely to hear a lot about the walkback than the initial critiques (27% to 37%).