People

• Trump began his second term by matching a record-high 52% approval from March 2017, but voters have steadily soured on his job performance since his second inauguration.
• At a similar point in Trump’s first term, 48% of voters approved and 45% disapproved of his job performance.

• Trump’s favorability ratings remain underwater, which has been the case more often than not since he took office.
• Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) face low awareness from the electorate.
• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the most famous congressional leader, is also the most unpopular one, with 2 in 5 voters expressing unfavorable views. Despite pushback from the left nationally, he’s maintained good numbers at home in New York.

Policy

• Voters are most likely to want Trump to focus on lowering prices for goods and services, and specifically health care affordability, following a campaign that was dominated by voters’ concerns about inflation.
• Amid his and Elon Musk’s high-profile efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency, just 26% of voters say that a reduction in the size and scope of the U.S. government should be a “top priority,” while 42% say it is for Trump.

• The president receives his best ratings on immigration (52%) and national security (51%).
• Roughly half of voters disapprove of Trump’s economic and trade handling, making them his worst issues.

• Republicans hold advantages over Democrats on trust to handle immigration, national security and the national debt.
• Voters are much more likely to trust Democrats to handle health care, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and the major U.S. entitlement programs.
• Voters are closely divided over whom they trust to handle the economy, taxes, trade and foreign policy and energy.

News

• Voters are 21 points more likely to say they’ve heard something negative about Trump than positive, marking a slight improvement from last week, when he tied his worst net buzz rating we’ve measured during his second term in office.
• Few voters say they’ve heard much about Johnson or Thune as the two work with Trump to plot his legislative strategy.
• Though Republicans enjoyed a narrow buzz advantage over Democrats between the November elections and the opening months of the second Trump presidency, that hasn’t been the case since late March.

• Voters were 32 points more likely to hear something negative than positive about the economy as the markets continued to react to Trump’s tariffs, marking a second-term low.
• As was the case throughout much of the 2024 campaign, immigration has been one of the most salient issues voters are hearing about in the news, with roughly 7 in 10 saying they'd heard something recently about it.
• Following Trump’s inauguration, Republican voters are increasingly likely to say that they’re hearing positive things about issues such as immigration, national security and public safety.

• Roughly 3 in 5 voters (59%) said they had seen, read or heard “a lot” about the death of Pope Francis, just short of the 60% who reported having consumed the same amount of information about the year’s most salient events so far — the Los Angeles-area wildfires and the crash of a passenger airliner with a U.S. Army helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
• More than 2 in 5 voters (43%) said they had recently heard a lot about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the highest we’ve tested so far.