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President Donald Trump's approval rating has reportedly "started to drop more quickly," according to polling expert Nate Silver in the latest edition of his Silver Bulletin Substack released on Tuesday (July 22).
Trump's net approval rating is currently at -8.9, which is a drop of -2.0 points in one week and only 0.8 points higher than the -9.7 net approval low point of his second term reported on April 29, but still about seven points higher than the same point of his first term, according to Silver. The president has reportedly seen a decrease in support for several policies including immigration (-3.4 to -7.4), economy (-12.1 to -14.1), trade (-14.5 to -17.5) and inflation (-24.5 to -24.8).
Additionally, the percentage of Americans who strongly approve of Trump's job performance has dropped below 27% for the first time during his second term with about 43% of respondents claiming they strongly disapprove of him.
Silver gained notoriety for successfully predicting 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election, as well as former President Barack Obama's re-election win in 2012 and Biden's win in the 2020 election. The pollster was, however, criticized for giving Hillary Clinton a 71.4% chance of winning over Trump after the former president 304 electoral college votes to win the election.
"I think people shouldn’t have been so surprised," Silver told the Harvard Gazette in 2017. "Clinton was the favorite, but the polls showed, in our view, particularly at the end, a highly competitive race in the Electoral College. We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence. Why did people think it was much less than that? I think there are a few things."