Hello?
Yeah, hi.
My name's Claire Tennisgetter.
I work for The New York Times.
Do you have five to ten minutes of chat?
I believe you took part in one of our polls recently.
Uh, sure.
Why not?
Sure, yeah, that's fine.
Yeah, that sounds great.
Yeah.
Okay, go ahead.
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittroweth.
This is The Daily.
How would you sum up your feelings about Trump's second term so far, in one word?
One word?
Okay, let's see.
Great.
Excellent.
Cautious optimism.
A little uneven.
Chaotic.
Horrible.
Embarrassing.
Terrifying.
Today, in a major new poll, The New York Times asked voters what they thought of the first eight months of President Trump's second term.
I think the majority of his policies are heading in the right direction.
The economy, for the prices, they're starting to come down.
I wish they'd come down more.
It's a period that's seen sweeping policy changes that have left little of the country untouched.
One of the biggest reasons that I voted for him, it was southern border.
But the way ICE is doing it is so horrible.
I think he's doing a good job.
But the one thing I wish that he would do is create some type of program where the people that are already here start a process where you could get legalization.
I guess that I'm shocked at some of his actions and disappointed in him.
Maybe generally I wish I hadn't voted for him.
My colleague, Nate Cohn, explains what the survey found and what it may tell us about where the country is heading next.
We need to tone down the rhetoric.
We need to work to find common ground and work through differences in opinions.
It's Tuesday, September 30th.
Nate, I've been really looking forward to talking to you, because so much has happened over the past several months since you were last on the show.
We've had record tariffs, immigration raids, the National Guard in American cities.
This massive domestic policy bill passed.
There's been an ongoing retribution campaign against Trump's enemies and a wave of political violence.
It has honestly been a lot.
And here we are, flying blind, no pull to sort it all out.
Top line, what did you find?
Well, after interviewing more than 1300 Americans from across the country, last week, we found almost the exact same results that we did in April on most of the important questions, despite all that's transpired over the last five or six months.
Trump's approval rating is one point different than it was in April.
It's at 43% now.
The Democrats are up two points in the race for Congress compared to three in April.
On almost every issue that we asked about, the results are just within a couple points of what they were six months ago.
Okay, that is not what I was expecting.
How is it possible that when so much has changed, the views have essentially remained the same?
I think it's worth going back to where we were when we conducted our last poll.
This was just after the Liberation Day tariffs were announced.
It was when Kilmar Abrego-Garcia was in El Salvador.
And at that time, Donald Trump was suffering a clear political cost for the excesses of his actions.
On everything we asked, voters said he was going too far.
And his ratings had declined since the election.
Now, what's happened since then?
He's pulled back on many of the things I just mentioned.
Liberation Day tariffs were pulled back.
Camaro Obrego-Garcia is in the United States.
He's also gone further in a whole bunch of areas that you've already mentioned.
But the accumulated effect hasn't necessarily been to worsen his position politically since April.
The voters who he still had with him in April were mostly strongly Republican-leaning voters, voters who backed him in 2016 and 2020 and 2024.
And while I think that we can probably come up with cases in fact our poll provides some cases where Trump has done things that those voters aren't necessarily happy with, much of what he has done those voters are happy with him about.
And they've stuck by his side over the last few months.
You're saying basically, Trump's approval numbers have remained stable, but they're at a pretty low point.
Correct.
You mentioned Kilmar Obrego-Garcia and that people really didn't like the excesses of the administration on immigration.
So let's talk about those policies because, as you noted, more has happened along those lines.
There has been, in many ways, an escalation of some of those aggressive enforcement approaches.
More raids, more protests about those raids.
So what are people saying about immigration now?
Well, I think that the public is of two minds about the immigration issue right now.
On the one hand, the public still supports deporting undocumented immigrants back to their home countries.
They also think that most of the people who the administration is deporting should be deported.
So that's a really important way that the public is generally on the administration side.
On the other hand, voters do think that the president's going too far.
And we didn't ask about a specific case where voters might disagree with the president.
For instance, they might disagree with defying court orders or sending people to countries that aren't their home countries, and so on.
But what we did ask was whether they thought that the process for deportation was generally fair or unfair.
And most voters thought it was unfair.
But between these two you can see a public that's kind of caught in between support of a general goal and being kind of repelled by the actual way the administration is going about its immigration policy.
Yeah.
What do you make of that?
Because it sounds like they want the thing that he's pursuing, but they don't like what he's actually doing to get there.
We have a couple of ways of getting at how people feel overall about the administration's policy.
One is to ask whether they approve or disapprove of his handling of immigration, and the other is whether he's gone too far, or he's handling it about right, or hasn't gone far enough.
And on both of those questions...
Voters sort out to a negative view of the president.
They disapprove of his handling of immigration and they think he's gone too far.
Now, it's worth noting that in each case, the results are really not that different than April.
So although the president has sort of gone further in terms of undertaking more actions that go beyond what someone might have wanted, he hasn't necessarily convinced more people in doing so that he's gone too far.
In terms of the potential for excesses?
Nate, did you specifically ask about the deployment of the US military into American cities?
I mean because in LA and now in Portland, the deployment has been intended to reinforce ICE's agenda.
In D.C., it was more squarely about reducing crime.
But overall, do people see that as an overreach?
They do.
We asked specifically whether the president had gone too far in deploying the National Guard to American cities.
53% said that he did.
We also asked whether they approved of his deployment to Washington, D.C. specifically.
A majority of voters said they disapproved.
And voters do have real concerns about the president's deployment of military forces as well.
More people were concerned that the president could use the National Guard to intimidate his political opponents than were concerned that crime would spiral out of control without the National Guard.
But there are a number of voters who are really concerned about crime.
And although they may think the president has gone too far, they sympathize with the direction of his effort.
And indeed, crime is the issue in the poll where he has his strongest overall approval rating.
Now, it's not a great approval rating, but it's better than everything else.
And I think that speaks to that.
Even when the president is doing things that have the potential to alienate people, because he's at least pushing in the right direction, he does get some credit from voters.
How do you square all of those things, Nate?
Is it just that people like the fact that he's prioritizing the problems that they care about, regardless of his approach?
Well, I think that you can not merely think that it's good that he's prioritizing the issue, but you can think it is good that the president has taken serious efforts to try and reduce crime.
This is what they would be saying themselves and give him credit for that.
Got it.
So it sounds like voters may not like the means that Trump is using in these cases, but they do approve of the ends of the goals on both immigration and public safety.
It kind of seems as though people have settled out.
They've decided early on in this presidency how they feel, and they haven't changed much.
I think that's right.
I think that most voters at this stage know where they stand on what the second Trump term looks like, which is being really aggressive about trying to fulfill the core promises of the America first agenda, whether it's on immigration and crime and so on.
And for a lot of the voters that put them over the top in the last election, this is too much.
And they decided that pretty quickly.
And for the voters that weren't repelled by his conduct in the first few months, there's been nothing about what he's done since then.
That's changed their mind.
Even if he's gone too far, they still appreciate that he is trying to fulfill objectives that they care about.
I want to talk about the economy.
This is a big issue that we haven't yet addressed.
Where do people stand on the economy at this moment?
Well, they don't think the economy is very good.
Only 26% of voters think the economy is good.
Voters are much likely to say that Trump has made the economy worse than say he has made it better.
The proportion who say he's making it worse is at 45%.
And his approval rating on the economy is pretty similar to his approval rating on everything else, which is to say that only 44 of people think he's doing a good job handling economic issues.
It's worth remembering that in his first term, and also during his reelection campaign, that the economy was a big strength.
And it's not a big strength for him right now.
The economy has been his strongest issue, right?
I mean, how much of a red alert warning sign should this be for him?
Well, I think that the economy has not only been his strongest issue, but it's been really critical to winning over the voters who are on the margins of the Trump coalition.
We talk all the time about his MAGA base.
But what wins the voters in the middle, whether it's working class white voters in Ohio or working class Latino voters in the Rio Grande, or the young voters that were dissatisfied?
The economy is really critical to what gets him over the top.
So at least for now, the state of the economy as it is, we're kind of muddling along, right?
We're not in some deep recession, but these aren't great prosperous times either.
Muddling along doesn't really threaten his base at this point, but I think it makes it really hard for him to win back the voters that have put him over the top in recent elections.
But the midterms are coming.
It would seem like that could be an opportunity for Democrats.
Stability in these numbers for Trump is obviously better than things getting much worse for him.
But people care a lot about the economy and they hold the party in power accountable, right?
I think that's reasonable to expect.
You know, the poll right now shows Democrats are up two on the question of whether they vote for Democrats or Republicans in the midterm election.
It's worth noting that's quite a bit better than the result of the 2024 election for Democrats.
The Republicans won by three.
So this is a meaningful improvement.
It would probably be enough for them to retake the House.
It's also not an extraordinary performance, right?
You know, they're not winning by seven or eight points like they were in 2018.
I will point out also that the Democrats have made their biggest gains compared to 2024 among young and nonwhite voters, the voters that swung most towards Donald Trump in 2024 because of the bad economy.
That's the group that in the poll looks like it's lurching back towards Democrats.
And the economy.
I think very well might be an important part of why those voters have swung back to the extent they have, even if it hasn't yet created the conditions for a Democratic landslide or something that people might hope for or imagine was even likely, given the president's low approval rating.
Now, there are limits to what this lead means.
They're up only two points.
For some comparison, Biden won by four and a half in 2020.
There are more people in the poll who say they are Republicans than Democrats, which has historically not been the case.
And if the Democrats are looking for a sweeping repudiation of Donald Trump, I don't see how they could look at these poll results and see that on the horizon.
And I think that is sort of what Democrats are looking for.
Bottom line.
When I look at this poll, I see lots of signs that voters are dissatisfied with Donald Trump.
He's gone too far.
I don't see any evidence that voters are looking to buy what the Democrats are selling either.
Even when you see opposition to some of Trump's policies, that opposition is not exactly driving voters into the arms of Democrats.
They aren't buying into whatever they see as Democrats' version of solutions to the country's problems, at least not in huge numbers.
Sure, there's a lot of room to disagree with Donald Trump without agreeing with the Democrats.
And, interestingly enough, on some of the issues where you can imagine that voters might be convinced of the non-Trump position, the Democrats aren't really owning that either.
Like take tariffs, for instance.
You would think that Donald Trump's excessive tariffs, which have, you know, in the minds of the public, hurt the economy and gone too far, that that might create an opening for the Democrats to campaign on eliminating tariffs.
That's not the position they're taking, is it?
So, on some of the things where Donald Trump arguably has set the Democrats best up, they're not necessarily in position to capitalize on it either.
That said, one of the most interesting things about this poll is that the economic and policy issues that we've been talking about do not rank highest on the minds of voters right now.
They say that other issues are more important problems.
And that is not something that I have seen before.
We'll be right back.
So in basically every poll for as long as we've been doing this, we ask people an open-ended question.
What's the most important problem facing the country today?
What's the most important issue?
In this poll, for the first time, the most common answers were about our politics.
What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?
I think our political division, it's division amongst the nation, the people.
Nobody's listening to anybody on either side.
People can't share ideas and opinions without being targeted by violence.
It reminds me of what was going on in Germany around like 1939.
It frightens me when people label people, calling somebody a Nazi, with not fully comprehending that term, because I think it incentivizes people to do harm.
I think he's bringing the country very close to civil war.
He loves that idea.
And it scared me so much.
I pray to God that we do get past this, that somehow people on the right and people on the left in leadership roles say stop.
Enough violence has occurred in our country.
We need to have a united front.
We need to have the country to come together.
And I just, I don't know.
I don't know if we're going to be able to do that.
It's a diverse category of different responses people can give about our political system, right?
But it might be concern about Trump as a threat to democracy.
It might be concern about political polarization and division.
It could be concern that Democrats are going to perpetrate acts of political violence.
Very different ways that you can be concerned about the health of our democracy and our political system.
We cobble all those answers together.
You got 36 percent of the respondents to this poll listing a concern about our political system and the health of our politics as the most important problem facing the country, compared to just 21 percent who listed an economic issue like the stock market or the cost of living.
So we're not talking about a concern that was necessarily weighted to one direction or another.
It was just a general sense that our politics is broken.
That's what you're saying.
Right.
And it gets expressed in different ways.
But no matter how you cut it, the problem is about our political system.
Now, we should say that this poll was taken right after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
So it makes sense that these concerns about the health of our politics were right on the top of mind for many voters.
And it's possible that, right as we head into a government shutdown, people will start thinking about something entirely differently than the risk of political violence.
That said, This is not some isolated occurrence.
This is part of a longer-term trend towards a more divisive kind of politics in the country.
And it could also continue to get worse, even if it's also possible that it gets better.
You know, when people say that they're concerned about the economy, the stakes, to me at least, seem pretty intuitive.
It's their livelihood, their ability to provide for their families.
With an answer that's about politics, it's just less straightforward.
And I'm wondering if you think this is an emotional reaction to just how unsettling the last few weeks and months have been, or what you think the stakes are here.
Well, I think there's a little bit of both.
You know there are lots of different levels who think that political divisions might lead to dysfunction or like the government shutdown we're about to have this week.
There are people who might think that this division could threaten the continuity of democracy in the United States.
So there's a wide range of concerns that people have about what political division might lead to.
But they're not just emotional concerns.
They're not just reacting against.
They think that political division and this range of political problems has real world consequences.
And I think the simplest question in the poll that we have that speaks to this is that we ask people whether America's political system can address the nation's problems or if we're just too politically divided to solve our problems.
And what'd they say?
They said by a two-to-one margin that we're too divided politically to solve our problems.
64% said too divided to solve our problems.
This is a significant change in the last few years.
We asked that same question in September of 2020 which, by the way, was not exactly some time when American politics was kumbaya.
No.
Middle of a pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, lots of unsettling moments then, too.
Even at that point, 54 percent said we could still address the nation's problems.
Only 40 percent said we were too politically divided.
So we've gone, in just the last five years, from being maybe not exactly optimistic, but perhaps cautiously optimistic that we can still solve our problems, to pretty resoundingly being pessimistic about the capacity of the political system to solve the country's problems.
That is a huge shift, Nate.
What do you make of that?
Well, first, I just can't help but want to reiterate what you said.
It is a huge shift.
We don't see swings in public opinion like this that often.
I was saying at the beginning that everything's the same.
So when you have a huge reversal in people's attitudes, it means something.
And if you look back over the long history of polling, there are other times when Americans have felt like the conditions in the country were worse.
I mean, you can imagine, like during the financial crisis or something, that more voters were saying that the economy was worse and thought that the country was in a worse spot.
But they didn't have the same pessimism about the political system's ability to get us back on track.
Right.
It's like people have felt way worse about the issues in the past, but they've still felt that our politics was fundamentally functional and that we could solve our problems.
And now they feel not great about the issues and totally pessimistic about the ability of our political system to resolve the problems we have now and the ones that will arise in the future.
Yeah, and I think that juxtaposition between voters being so pessimistic about the political system at a time when, in a lot of ways, material economic conditions aren't that bad is so telling right.
It would be one thing for voters to be this pessimistic about the political system if things were just really, really bad, like the depths of the financial crisis and during the Iraq war.
But for it to be happening now.
It really just shows how squarely voters are thinking about the politics itself as the problem.
Now it's worth noting.
I guess I should caution that that doesn't mean that voters are panicking about the imminent collapse of American democracy or a collapse of the government.
And, you know, I think it's fairly telling that we felt compelled to ask about this, but we did.
And only 18 percent of voters say that American democracy isn't strong enough to survive the Trump years.
That's a big number in one sense, but it's still well short of the majority of the public thinking that the end of democracy is right around the corner.
Mm hmm.
Only 31 percent say that the country is heading off on the wrong track to such an extent that we're in danger of failing as a country.
So Americans are getting more concerned about the political system itself, but they haven't yet become convinced that a calamity is right around the corner yet either.
They're not at the worst case scenario yet.
The worst case scenarios may not be here.
At least to me.
I interpret this to mean that voters think we're just going to kind of keep muddling through, that things could get worse, that we can't solve the problems that we already have.
But they're not necessarily convinced that things are on track to culminate in the end of American democracy, that things will kind of just keep on going as they are for the foreseeable future, where we have a pretty flawed political system but nothing necessarily catastrophic in the imminent future.
And yet, when you think about that 31 percent that does think America may be headed toward becoming a failed state.
Yes, that's a minority, but it's still a lot of people.
It's a significant chunk of voters who are really at the end of their rope.
And I'm wondering if there's ever been a time when that kind of disillusionment with politics has been this high is the way.
It's a great question and it's a little bit hard to answer because in the past pollsters haven't even thought to ask questions like this.
There have been lots of times in American history where things have looked pretty bad, but there haven't been too many times in the era of modern polling, which is say since the mid-1940s, when pollsters would have thought to ask about whether America could fail as a country or whether America might cease to be a democracy.
Those are things that Americans have basically been able to take for granted for the entire period when pollsters have been conducting public opinion research.
And so as a consequence, we don't have a long track record of questions like this to look back on.
My guess is that such a large share of the public hasn't had these attitudes before.
The fact that people haven't even thought to ask is what's ultimately telling.
But I guess I don't know that for sure.
Maybe if we'd asked in 1971 or something, people would have been similarly dark.
But I doubt it.
Now I should say, just because people are so pessimistic about politics doesn't mean that they see the other side as the enemy.
You know, in this poll more than 80 percent of voters said that they saw the other side as just fellow Americans who they disagree with, not as the enemy.
That's heartening.
Yeah.
So you know you mentioned political violence as the sort of thing that might be likely to unfold as voters become more pessimistic about the political system.
And I will say, with numbers like that and with the numbers that are produced by other polling firms, I don't see a groundswell of people who are pessimistic, inclined to pursue political violence to achieve political goals.
What I do see is a growing share of Americans who are willing to support more and more extreme policies to try and address what they see as deeper and deeper problems with society.
I think you can even interpret the continued political support for Trump in that light, right?
On the one hand, there are Republicans who are likelier to support more extreme steps by Trump that other politicians wouldn't have taken, because they think the problems are so bad.
And then alternately.
There are also people who may not even support the more extreme measures that Trump takes, but are willing to tolerate them because they think the problems are so bad or because they think the other side is worse.
So I think you can see how this pessimism affects our politics and creates more extreme political parties and politicians.
And maybe that helps explain the result of this latest poll that Trump's numbers have held steady, despite him using a bunch of aggressive tactics that a lot of people really hate.
That's right.
Nate, thanks so much for your time.
Thanks for having me.
We'll be right back.
And I have just concluded an important meeting on many vital issues, including In a joint press conference on Monday, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled a proposal to end the war in Gaza.
Hamas will be disarmed.
Gaza will be demilitarized.
Israel will retain security responsibility.
The plan would require Hamas to release all Israeli hostages, to disarm, to play no role in governing Gaza in the future and to agree to a less than full Israeli withdrawal from the enclave.
Hamas is unlikely to accept Trump's plan in its current form, since it includes numerous conditions that the militant group has consistently rejected.
But if Hamas rejects your plan, Mr President, or if they supposedly accept it and then basically do everything to counter it, then Israel will finish the job by itself.
Netanyahu said that if Hamas doesn't agree, Israel would finish the job by itself, with or without international support.
And if Hamas rejects the deal, which is always possible, they're the only one left.
Everyone else has accepted it.
But I have a feeling that we're going to have a positive answer.
But if not, as you know, Bibi, you'd have our full backing to do what you want. would have to do.
And Trump warned that in that case, Israel would have his full backing to eliminate the group.
And Trump met with congressional leaders from both parties at the White House but made no progress as the government faced a Wednesday deadline to avoid a shutdown.
Vice President J.D.
Vance blamed Democrats, who he said won't do the right thing.
Democrats are demanding a reversal of the Medicaid cuts that Republicans pushed through earlier this year.
And Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said there were still very large differences over health care.
Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowetzki, Rochelle Bonja, Claire Tenesketter and Caitlin O'Keefe.
It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg and Paige Cowett.
Contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.
That's it for The Daily.
I'm Natalie Kitro-Eff.
See you tomorrow.
