Trump Approval Rating: Only 8 States Back Trump
Meta description: President Donald Trump’s net approval is positive in only eight states days before the November 3 midterms, a new state-by-state tracker shows.
Days before Americans vote in the midterm elections, the president’s standing looks narrow on the map. A state-by-state tracker reported on October 31 puts President Donald Trump in positive territory in just eight of the 50 states, while his net approval is negative in the other 42. The finding lands at the sharp end of a campaign in which control of Congress is at stake, and in which the president has spent the closing weeks travelling the country to rally Republican voters. It also arrives alongside a separate national survey that gives Trump his lowest approval rating yet in that pollster’s series. Neither measure decides an election on its own, and pollsters are careful to say that approval is not the same as a vote. But taken together, the two releases sketch the same picture: a president heading into the midterms with his support concentrated in a small number of states, and with the contests that will decide the Senate taking place in places where his numbers are underwater.
The tracker behind the headline is run by Civiqs, which surveys registered voters on a rolling basis. Its latest state figures, reported by USA Today on October 31, show a map that has narrowed to a core of states the president has won repeatedly. That concentration matters because the midterms will not be fought everywhere at once. They will be fought in a handful of Senate races, in swing states, and in districts where a few points of enthusiasm, or a few points of disaffection, can change the result. A president whose approval is positive in only eight states is not necessarily a president whose party is certain to lose, but he is a president whose presence on the campaign trail is a calculation for every candidate he appears beside, rather than an unqualified asset.
Trump Approval Rating: The Eight-State Map
The eight states where the tracker still gives Trump a positive net approval rating are Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. USA Today notes that he carried every one of them in each of the past three presidential elections, which underlines how much of his remaining positive territory is made up of states that were already firmly in his column. Wyoming is his strongest state in the tracker, at a net approval rating of 14 points. The other seven are positive by smaller margins, and the tracker does not suggest a broad national base so much as a durable one in the places most loyal to him.
Kansas sits on the edge of that map. The latest tracker reading there is exactly even, with 46 percent approving of the president’s job performance and 46 percent disapproving. That even split is a small movement from the tracker’s previous update, reported a week earlier, when Kansas stood at minus one point. It is also a striking distance from where the state once stood for a Republican president who carried it comfortably in the last three presidential elections. A state that is tied on presidential approval is a state where a Senate race can become genuinely competitive, and Kansas has indeed become one of the surprises of this cycle, as discussed below.
The list of eight positive states is unchanged from the previous tracker update, but several individual readings have moved by a point. Michigan improved by a point, from minus 27 to minus 26, and Texas moved from minus 21 to minus 20, while Kentucky slipped from minus 12 to minus 13. Movements of a single point in a rolling tracker should not be over-read; they sit well within the noise that surrounds any survey, and a one-point shift does not turn a struggling state into a strong one. What matters more is the shape of the map, which has barely changed: a small positive core, a large negative remainder, and a set of battlegrounds firmly on the negative side.
Election Polls: The Swing Senate States
The most consequential part of the tracker is not the eight-state core but the six states where the closest Senate races are being fought. In all six, Trump’s net approval is negative, and in most of them it is negative by a wide margin. Alaska stands at minus 25 points, Michigan at minus 26, Maine at minus 29, North Carolina at minus 18, Ohio at minus 18 and Texas at minus 20. These are the states where the battle for the Senate will largely be decided, and they are also states where Republican candidates have had to decide, race by race, how closely to stand beside the president.
Those state readings line up with the candidate polling in the same states. Polls from CNN and the research firm SSRS, reported on October 29, put Democrats ahead in four battleground Senate races: in Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed led Republican Mike Rogers by seven points, 49 percent to 42 percent; in Texas, Democrat James Talarico led Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton by six points, 49 percent to 43 percent; in Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson led Republican Senator Susan Collins by four points, 49 percent to 45 percent; and in Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton led Republican Senator Roger Marshall by four points, 49 percent to 45 percent. The margins of error on those polls ranged from 4.2 to 4.7 points, so the closer races are within or near the margin, but the direction across all four is the same.
Other surveys have pointed the same way, sometimes more sharply. A Washington Post poll released on October 30 put Hamilton ahead of Marshall in Kansas by nine points, 52 percent to 43 percent, among likely voters. Polling averages have shown the Kansas and Iowa Senate races as essentially tied, with Hamilton holding a fraction of a point in Kansas and Republican Ashley Hinson holding a fraction of a point in Iowa. The differences between individual polls are a reminder that no single survey should be treated as a result. Taken as a group, however, they describe a Senate map in which Democrats are competitive in states that Republicans would once have counted as safe, and in which the president’s own standing is part of the headwind Republican candidates face.
Presidential Approval Rating: Red States Slipping
Beyond the battlegrounds, the tracker shows slippage in states that have long been reliable for Republicans. Kentucky, a state Trump has carried comfortably, now gives him a net approval rating of minus 13 points. South Carolina, another state in his column in the past three elections, stands at minus 10. Those figures do not mean either state is about to vote Democratic in a Senate race; presidential approval and a Senate vote are different questions, and both states have deep Republican roots. They do mean that disapproval of the president is no longer confined to states that vote Democratic. It has spread into the territory where his party has traditionally been strongest.
That spread is visible in the tracker’s history as well. USA Today noted that before the start of the United States war in Iran, the tracker had Kansas at plus 10 points and Iowa at minus 8. Kansas is now even and Iowa is far deeper in negative territory. The comparison does not by itself prove what caused the change, and many things have happened in the meantime, from the cost of living to the conduct of the midterm campaign itself. But the direction is consistent across the map: states that once gave the president a cushion now give him little or none, and states that were already sceptical have grown more so.
The national picture from the same tracker reinforces the point. Civiqs reported that, as of October 30, 34 percent of registered voters approved of Trump’s job performance and 60 percent disapproved, with 6 percent neither approving nor disapproving, based on 139,654 responses collected since January 20, 2025. That is a rolling registered-voter measure, and it is not directly comparable with a poll of likely voters, which is a narrower and more election-focused group. The distinction matters: registered voters include people who may not vote, while likely voters are screened for their intention to turn out. Both measures, however, point in the same direction, and the gap between them is smaller than the gap between approval and disapproval in either one.
Midterm Elections 2026: The Battle for the Senate
The reason these numbers carry weight beyond the president’s personal standing is the arithmetic of the Senate. Republicans currently hold a 53 to 47 advantage, which means Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control. That is a demanding target in any midterm, and it would require Democrats to hold their own seats while winning in states that have recently voted Republican. The polling described above suggests that path is open, though far from certain. A lead in a poll is not a lead on election night, and the final days of a campaign, when turnout operations and late-breaking events matter most, can still move races that look settled in surveys.
The campaign itself has reflected that uncertainty. On October 29, the Republican National Committee announced that Trump had cancelled rallies planned in Kansas and Iowa, two states with unexpectedly competitive Senate races, in favour of tele-rallies for candidates in 19 states, a format the committee said would let him reach more voters in the limited time left. The cancellations drew immediate speculation about whether the party was pulling back from states it feared losing. Within a day, the rallies were back on, rearranged for November 1, after the president said Republicans in both states had asked him to come in person. The episode captured the dilemma facing Republican candidates in states where the president is unpopular: his rallies energise the party’s base, but his presence can also remind wavering voters of the very record they are weighing against him.
Trump has held more than two dozen rallies in the closing stretch of the campaign, and he has urged his supporters to vote as though he himself were on the ballot, warning that his voters do not always turn out in the same numbers when he is not running. That appeal is, in effect, an acknowledgement of the turnout problem that midterm elections pose for any president’s party. The party in the White House usually loses ground in midterms, and it loses more ground when its voters stay home. The president’s closing message is therefore less about persuading undecided voters than about making sure the voters who already support him actually cast a ballot.
Who Is Leading in the Polls Right Now?
The national surveys released in the final days point in the same direction as the state tracker, though with different numbers that reflect different methods. An Emerson College poll released on Friday, October 30, put Trump’s national approval rating at 37 percent, the lowest he has recorded in Emerson’s polling, and two points below his previous low of 39 percent, which he had recorded in that firm’s September, July, June and May surveys. The poll was conducted from October 24 to 26 among 1,000 likely voters, with a margin of error of three percentage points. In the same survey, Democrats led Republicans by 10 points on the generic congressional ballot, the question that asks voters which party they would back for Congress without naming candidates.
Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling, said in a statement that with about 5 percent of voters still undecided, most of them independents and half of them disapproving of Trump, the Democrats’ congressional ceiling could be higher than the poll reports. That observation matters because undecided voters in a midterm often break against the party in power, though they do not always do so, and a five-point undecided group is large enough to change the margin in close races. It is also a reminder that a generic ballot lead is not a seat count: votes are distributed unevenly across districts and states, and a national lead can coexist with losses in the places that decide control.
Polling averages tell a similar story at a slightly different level. As of October 30, the RealClearPolitics average put Trump at 38.4 percent approval and 59.7 percent disapproval. The New York Times polling average had him at 37 percent approval and 60 percent disapproval, while the Silver Bulletin average put him at 37.3 percent approval and 59.9 percent disapproval. The three averages use different combinations of polls and different weightings, which is why they differ by a point or so, but they agree on the essentials: approval in the high thirties, disapproval around 60 percent, and a net rating of roughly minus 22 points. For a president heading into a midterm, that is a difficult starting position, though not an unprecedented one.
What Happens Next: Voter Turnout and Early Voting
What happens next will be decided less by polls than by turnout. Early voting is already under way in much of the country, and the final weekend of the campaign will be dominated by the ground game: volunteers knocking on doors, campaigns calling their supporters, and both parties trying to bank votes before election day on November 3. The president’s rescheduled Kansas and Iowa rallies on November 1 are part of that final push, as are the tele-rallies that replaced some of his in-person events. Whether those rallies help or hurt in states where his approval is negative is a question each candidate has had to answer for themselves, and some have kept their distance even while welcoming his endorsement.
For Democrats, the task is to convert a polling advantage into seats, which means winning in states like Kansas and Texas where they have not won a Senate race in decades, and holding the seats they already have in states where the president’s unpopularity may not be enough on its own. For Republicans, the task is to hold the Senate by persuading voters to separate their view of the president from their view of the individual candidates, and by turning out a base that the polls suggest is less enthusiastic than it was in 2024. Both tasks depend on voters who have not yet made up their minds, and on voters who have made up their minds but have not yet voted.
The tracker will keep updating after the election, and its post-election readings will show whether the midterm result changed the president’s standing or merely reflected it. If Republicans hold the Senate despite the president’s negative ratings, the episode will be studied as a case in which candidate quality and local issues overcame a national headwind. If Democrats take control, the eight-state map will be remembered as an early warning that was visible days before the vote, in the states where it mattered most. Either way, the map on October 31 is a snapshot, not a verdict. It shows a president whose support has narrowed to eight states, a Senate battleground where he is underwater in every close race, and an electorate that will settle the argument on November 3.
Source: USA Today