Trump gets help ignoring public opinion — voters should worry

On Wednesday, Gallup announced that after 88 years, it will no longer be tracking presidential approval ratings. The organization that began asking Americans a simple question in 1938 — ”Do you approve or disapprove today of Franklin Roosevelt’s job as President?” — now believes the very premise of the poll and the results it provided “no longer represent an area where Gallup can make its most distinctive contribution.”

A spokesperson for the organization characterized the decision as “part of a broader, ongoing effort to align all of Gallup’s public work with its mission” and denied that it came in response to pressure from the Trump administration. But the sudden change, coming at a time when reports have circulated about Donald Trump’s anger at his historically-low approval ratings, is suspect. In a recent video, Democratic strategist James Carville suggested that Gallup’s move was “a strategic decision.”

“I’m going to tell you right now, Gallup, I don’t believe you,” he said. “I believe you were pressured. I believe this story needs to be explored, because the surrender and capitulation we are seeing at a time of need for the United States is unbelievable.”

Multiple polls have captured an undeniable truth: Trump’s approval ratings are weak. Two months ago, a Gallup poll showed that Trump had a 36% approval rating, which is a low point for his second term — and is among the lowest approval ratings recorded for a president at this stage of a term.

In a healthy democracy, political leaders typically respond by adjusting their policies or message in an effort to regain the approval of voters. But Trump is doing the opposite. With his ongoing mass deportation campaign, the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and the FBI’s raid on election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, the president is escalating his efforts to silence his critics and weaken America’s democratic institutions.

All the while, he is raging at the polls, claiming that unfavorable surveys are part of a vast left-wing conspiracy against him — and threatening to take legal action. On Jan. 22, when the results of the New York Times/Siena poll showed him with low approval ratings, he vented on Truth Social about the “fake results” and threatened to add the poll to his defamation suit against the outlet. There is precedent for such a threat. In December 2024, Trump sued pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for a poll released just before Election Day that showed him losing Iowa. (He went on to win the state.) The case remains in litigation.

This is Orwellian behavior. Like other authoritarians, Trump does not like the facts and attempts to avoid reality, so he tries to twist them to fit his will.

Autocrats use the power of the state to silence dissent and suffocate democratic life. But even that power requires public cooperation, taking the form of what historian Timothy Snyder, a leading authority on authoritarianism, describes as “anticipatory obedience.”

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder explains in his book “On Tyranny.” “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle.”

Similar patterns have emerged as news organizations, law firms, universities and other institutions have bent the knee — often unsuccessfully — in attempts to placate Trump and his allies. 

When leading institutions surrender to an autocrat, it normalizes the behavior and sets a precedent that others will follow. This is especially true of a highly-respected organization such as Gallup, which has, for almost nine decades, occupied an outsized role in American political life.

Henry E. Brady, the former president of the American Political Science Association who now serves as dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and professor of political science and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, noted the historical context of Gallup’s announcement. The organization’s founder, George Gallup, he said, “argued that public opinion polls could provide information that elections could not give us.”

“Elections only tell us about public opinion every two to four years, and they do not tell us much about the opinions that lead to one candidate being elected over another,” Brady said, summarizing Gallup’s thinking. “They do not tell us why people voted as they did. They tell us only whether the public prefers one candidate to another, and the reasons are often hard to decipher — leading to the contentious debates about electoral ‘mandates.’”

Public opinion polls, though, which include the measure of presidential approval, “could tell us what elections mean. They would provide a barometer of public opinion.”

Over the years, surveys charting presidential approval ratings “from Roosevelt to Trump” have contributed to democracy, Brady argued. “It is the longest-running time series that we have on politics, and it allows us to compare presidential performance across presidents and political eras.”   

Opinion polls also allow us to do something else: combat misinformation and disinformation on “what people think,” said Andrew J. Seligsohn, the president of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research-to-action organization. “It’s easy to conclude that we know what everyone believes based on what we see on social media or in partisan news sources. But these conclusions are often false. If we don’t have reliable, methodologically sound, independent evidence from credible sources about what members of the public believe, we can be misled — as can legislators, courts, and leaders of other powerful institutions.”

All presidents have been concerned about their approval ratings. But Trump is uniquely fixated on them. 

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Despite that, Marc Farinella, the executive director of the Center for Survey Methodology at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, expressed skepticism that Gallup’s shift came in response to pressure from Trump. Instead, he said that the move reflects a changed political landscape — one in which methodology matters less to consumers than topline results: “There are now numerous polling firms that use less rigorous, and arguably less accurate, methodologies to track presidential approval and take other simple measurements that political junkies like to read about. News consumers aren’t focused on the limits and potential pitfalls of various methodologies; they are just focused on the results.” 

Farinella explained that the polls presidents and presidential candidates really care about are much more “detailed, more extensive, more sophisticated and more methodologically rigorous than the publicly available polls we all see and hear about.”

But context and appearance matter, as Seligsohn said. “Gallup says this was a genuine strategic decision unrelated to external pressure, and I have no basis for doubting that. In the current climate, though, appearing to capitulate can matter if it normalizes that behavior, even if the decision was based on unrelated business factors.”

Trump’s threats and lawsuits against media outlets, and his legal action against Selzer, are among the behavior that is being normalized. Then there is the president’s desire, part of a years-long quest, to make America and reality itself an extension of his mind and ego.

Even if Trump’s face were carved into Mount Rushmore and his name placed on currency and public polls declared a 110% approval rating, it would not change the underlying fact that a majority of Americans disapprove of him as president.

From the “No Kings” protests and strikes to the slew of recent Republican losses in elections across the country, public opposition to the president and his agenda is growing — and Trump is not amused.

Empirical facts have the power to puncture partisan echo chambers and other closed-off belief systems. In a country experiencing democratic backsliding, this function becomes essential, providing what Seligsohn called a “corrective function” that is “especially important right now, as democratic norms are violated in new ways nearly every day.”

“If we think that everyone else accepts that as normal, we might be inclined to do so ourselves,” he said. “If we learn that many people do not, we might be more inclined to ask questions. Public opinion research gets us outside of our echo chambers and confronts us with the fact that Americans have ideas, including ideas that are very different from what we might assume to be the case based on our own experience.” 

However Gallup explains it, the decision to stop tracking presidential approval numbers is a significant loss for democratic accountability. 

For almost nine decades, Gallup helped shine that light. Now it has chosen to dim it at a moment when American democracy requires more illumination, not less. 

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