--- title: Donald Trump's Approval Rating: How Low Can It Drop? description: President Trump's approval rating recently fell to 34 percent. How much lower can it go? We crunched the numbers canonical: https://time.com/4916675/donald-trump-approval-rating-low/ author: Chris Wilson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-08-31T12:00:26.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-08T09:32:10.107Z article:section: Politics og:title: Here's How Low Trump's Approval Rating Could Drop og:description: His approval rating recently fell to 34%, but it could go even further og:url: https://time.com/4916675/donald-trump-approval-rating-low/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte30bbbf887bdf50d/6988dbc7ab6d77482a6af9d7/trump-press-conference.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3240 og:image:height: 1823 og:image:alt: President Trump Holds Joint News Conference With President Of Finland og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Here's How Low Trump's Approval Rating Could Drop twitter:description: His approval rating recently fell to 34%, but it could go even further twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte30bbbf887bdf50d/6988dbc7ab6d77482a6af9d7/trump-press-conference.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Here's How Low President Trump's Approval Rating Could Drop > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=1cc8c1f1-6366-4e04-a5a1-fb8927ef99e8&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Donald Trump Talks About 'Us' and 'Them' [Watch (HLS stream): How Donald Trump Talks About 'Us' and 'Them'](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uaowjrGn.m3u8) (1:49)  _Published 2017-08-24. Like most successful politicians, the president makes healthy use of collective pronouns like we, our and us to connect with his crowds. He also likes to use they, their and them to talk about his opponents._  by [Chris Wilson](https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/)  ## Chris Wilson Aug 31, 2017 12:00 PM UTC  by [Chris Wilson](https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/)  ## Chris Wilson Aug 31, 2017 12:00 PM UTC President Trump loves breaking records, even when the [evidence](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/22/spicer-earns-four-pinocchios-for-a-series-of-false-claims-on-inauguration-crowd-size/?utm%5Fterm=.2b0644a03bc6) is [dubious](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/08/16/trumps-claim-that-unemployment-is-at-a-record-low/?utm%5Fterm=.2d035e682add), but here’s one he probably doesn’t want to shatter: It is conceivable that he could become the least popular president in modern history. That record is currently held by Richard Nixon, who [resigned with a 24% approval rating](http://www.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx?g%5Fsource=WWWV7HP&g%5Fmedium=topic&g%5Fcampaign=tiles). George W. Bush came perilously close to matching that record at 25% in early October of 2008\. Trump is in shooting distance—having already reached record unpopularity for a president so early into his first term. He [recently dipped to 34% approval](http://time.com/4786624/donald-trump-approval-rating-presidents/), his lowest since taking office, and since then has rebounded just [one point, to 35%](http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx). To be sure, political approval can be a rollercoaster. Presidents tend to see a bump in approval during a 9/11-type crisis or the onset of a war. Major legislation, changes in White House personnel or a shift in tone from Trump himself could cause him to rebound. But generally speaking, the historical pattern is for presidents to slowly become less popular in the months after inauguration, and that has held true for Trump. The question then is: How low could Trump go? There is a whole cottage industry around parsing polls and a variety of ways to calculate this figure, from back-of-the-envelope math to complex statistical models. In consultation with David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research who runs the site [PredictWise](http://predictwise.com/), TIME decided to examine the historical lows in presidential approval ratings among respondents of different partisan leanings, back to the Nixon Administration, and apply those figures to the current political environment. (Full disclosure: I [worked with Rothschild](https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/signal/obama-poised-win-2012-election-303-electoral-votes-202543583.html?ref=gs) in 2012.) This is a logical place to start when estimating Trump’s possible future ratings. In the current hyper-partisan environment, the strongest indicator of whether a person supports the President is his or her party affiliation. This hasn’t always been the case. “Before Obama, presidential approval used to track closely with economic indicators,” says Rothschild. “More and more, people are answering questions based on their party identification.” Rothschild says the term is known among economists as “partisan cheerleading.” This is unmistakably present in polls of Trump’s job performance. He is [currently polling at 78%](http://www.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx) approval among self-identified Republicans, 30% among independents and 7% among Democrats. So to project Trump’s lowest possible rating, we had to figure out how low support for a Republican president has ever gotten among each of those three factions. Fortunately, Gallup has regularly been asking party identification since they first started presidential polling, so we had a lot of data to work with. The lowest support a Republican president has ever had among his own party is 48%, in the final days of Nixon’s tenure. That’s not an anomaly: During his lowest moment, George W. Bush had only 55% support from Republicans. The lowest figure for Democrats’ and independents’ approval of a Republican president — 3% and 19%, respectively — also come during Bush’s low point. And while 48% support among all Republicans isn’t inconceivable, there’s a reason the theoretical low is not zero. Last week, a [poll from Monmouth University](http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/17/politics/trump-approvers-never-stop-approving-poll/index.html) found that many entrenched Trump supporters have no intention of ever leaving those trenches — just as a roughly equal proportion of his critics sees no possibility of changing their minds. To estimate how low Trump can go, then, it is just a matter of applying the theoretical lows among Democrats, Republicans and independents to the current levels of party identification in the U.S., which remain fairly consistent. Currently, [according to Gallup](http://www.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx), 28% of Americans are Republicans, another 28% are Democrats, and 41% identify as independents. Apply the historic lows to those populations and you come out with a **theoretical low of 22% approval** for Trump, which is a shade below where Nixon or George W. Bush ever reached. Below is a graph of how Trump has fared so far among the three groups and overall, plus dotted lines showing how far he’d have to have fall with each group to reach this figure.  Of course, one could argue that, having pulverized most other presidential norms, Trump is impervious to past historical trends. Just as he could bounce back, it’s possible he could sink even further among, say, independents than any previous modern president. But Rothschild disagrees. “Things do change,” he says, “but history still serves as a good guide.” ## Transcript Donald Trump likes to talk about us. Like most successful politicians the president makes healthy use of collective pronouns, like we, our and us to connect with his crowds. He also likes to use they, their, and them to talk about his opponents. He most often does this to talk about the United States, a routine rhetorical Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China, in a trade deal? They kill us. As a candidate, he also used it to draw his supporters together. But the silent majority is back, and we're gonna take the country back. [ APPLAUSE ] But some of Trump's other uses of these words have been less routine, and more revealing of how he really thinks about politics. During his campaign against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump occasionally used We to refer Just to men, a move some pundits called playing the man card. I mean all of the men, we're petrified to speak to women anymore, we may raise our voice. You know what? The women get it better than we do, folks, all right? They get it better than we do. He's also used the words us and them to talk about America and Islam, creating a bright line between the two that his predecessors tried hard to avoid. I think Islam. Hates us. And most recently Trump used the words to draw a line between people who want to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces and those who don't. They're trying to take away our culture, they're trying to take away our history. Politicians like to talk about us to draw Americans together. But Trump also uses them to pull us apart. 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