This has turned out to be an evergreen hed.

Afunny thing happened to our political blowhard class on its way to its next appointed bout of savvy prognosticating. As breathless pundits looked to this week’s handful of off-year elections for telltale signs of the country’s mood swings, the news broke that President Donald Trump has reached a new low in his national approval ratings. In a CNN poll released Monday, 63 percent of respondents disapproved of his performance in office, leaving just 37 percent approving. As polling analyst G. Elliot Morris notes, the 26 point net gap in disapproval is the lowest Trump has ever clocked—even in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when many observers predicted his political demise. By comparison, an enfeebled and marginalized Joe Biden sported a 40 percent approval rating when he left office. A plurality of 42 percent approval would show Trump holding on to the 2024 coalition that elected him, but this latest swoon indicates that independents and even traditional GOP supporters are turning against him. Meanwhile, The Economist’s poll tracker shows that Trump’s approval is underwater in all seven of the swing states he carried last November, as well as in Texas. That’s right: The state that’s frantically (and secretively) redrawing its congressional maps to suit Trump’s whims—and has even filed an actual lawsuit against Tylenol based on Trump and RFK Jr.’s fabricated claims that the pain suppressant promotes autism in utero—has soured on Trump’s agenda.

It’s easy to make too much of snapshot surveys of presidential approval, but, as Morris also notes, polling averages have been trending strongly away from Trump over the past two weeks. The intensity of that disapproval is also striking: “Depending on the polls you pick for your average,” Morris writes, “between 46 and 50 percent of U.S. adults tell pollsters they “strongly disapprove” of the job Trump is doing as president. That is double the percent that strongly approve…. Put another way, less than half of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 currently ‘strongly approve’ of his presidency.” When you factor in disapproval among respondents who didn’t vote in the last election, the MAGA picture gets grimmer still, with less than a third of American adults approving of Trump, and 53 percent disapproving—48 percent of them doing so “strongly.”