Trump Approval Rating Hits Record Low as Rogan Turns
The latest Trump approval rating figures tell a story the White House did not want to hear, and now one of the president's most important allies from the 2024 campaign is saying it out loud. Joe Rogan, the podcaster whose endorsement helped Donald Trump win over young male voters two years ago, said on his show this week that the Republican Party has lost far more than its online base in the midterm elections. They did not just lose the podcast bros, Rogan said. They lost most of the country.
The remarks, made on the November 13 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, were Rogan's first direct comments on the midterm results, and they landed as new polling showed the president's standing at its lowest point of his second term. The most recent Economist/YouGov survey found that only 32 percent of Americans approve of the president, down four points from the previous week and below his previous second-term low of 33 percent, recorded in August. For a president who built his comeback on a coalition that included millions of young men who had never voted Republican before, the combination of the poll and the podcaster's verdict amounts to a warning from inside his own tent.
Trump Approval Rating: A Record Low After the Midterms
The numbers behind Rogan's remarks are stark. The Economist/YouGov poll put Trump's approval at 32 percent, the lowest of his second term, and the four-point drop in a single week suggests the midterm defeat is still dragging his standing down rather than settling into a new floor. The survey was the latest in a run of polls showing the president at record-low popularity, and it arrived just days after voters delivered Democrats strong majorities in both chambers of Congress in an election that was widely read as a referendum on the president himself.
The scale of the shift among the voters Rogan speaks to is striking. A New York Times analysis of the election results showed that men ages 18 to 29 moved 34 points toward the Democrats in the midterms, a swing that reversed one of the most important trends of the 2024 election. Two years ago, Trump made historic gains with young men, a group that had long leaned Democratic, and Rogan's endorsement was widely credited with helping to deliver them. The midterm results suggest that advantage has not just narrowed but collapsed, and Rogan's own comments indicate that he sees the same thing in his audience.
The midterm defeat itself was sweeping. Democrats took the Senate and the House, a result that the president had invited voters to treat as a verdict on him, after he spent the closing weeks of the campaign urging supporters to vote as if his name were on the ballot. The outcome left Trump facing a hostile Congress for the final two years of his presidency, with his legislative agenda stalled and his nominees and judges subject to Democratic consent from January 3, when the new Congress takes its seats. It also left his party searching for explanations, and Rogan offered one of the bluntest.
Election Polls: What Rogan Actually Said
Rogan made the comments during a Protect Our Parks episode of his podcast, recorded with comedians Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir. The conversation turned to the political climate after the midterms, and Rogan did not soften his assessment. They did not just lose the podcast bros, he said. They lost most of the country. The line was aimed at the idea that the Republican losses could be explained away as the defection of a narrow online audience, and Rogan rejected that framing outright.
He pointed to two specific reasons for the collapse in support. The first was the war in Iran, which Rogan described as a war that no one wants to be in. He argued that support for the administration began to fade when it got into the conflict, and he said the war had upset supporters who may have voted for Trump based on a promise to keep America out of foreign wars. The second was immigration enforcement, which Rogan described as militarized police in the streets wearing masks with no ID, a reference to the federal immigration crackdown that has put masked agents in American cities.
Rogan had criticized both policies before the election, and his latest comments were consistent with that record. He had spoken against the Iran war before voters went to the polls, saying it had upset supporters who backed Trump in 2024, and he had slammed the immigration agency for operating as a militarized force in American cities. Before the midterms, he also said he was concerned about what Trump might do after the election. What was new on Friday was not the criticism itself but the conclusion he drew from it: that the administration had lost not just a faction of its coalition but the country as a whole.
The timing of the remarks also mattered. Rogan had been mostly silent on politics in the days after the Republican defeat, and he had not directly addressed the midterm results before the November 13 episode. That silence was itself noted by commentators, who pointed out that the man who had been the loudest voice for Trump among young men in 2024 had gone quiet just as his party was suffering its worst defeat in years. When he finally spoke, the message was not reassurance. It was a diagnosis, delivered in the plain language his audience expects from him.
Midterm Elections 2026: The Podcaster Who Helped Trump Win
To understand why Rogan's words carry weight, it helps to remember the role he played in 2024. Rogan officially endorsed Trump ahead of that election, and his show, the most listened-to podcast in the country, became a central stop in the campaign's effort to reach young men who do not watch cable news or read newspapers. Trump appeared on the program, as did his allies, and the endorsement was seen as a signal to millions of listeners that voting Republican was acceptable, even fashionable, in a demographic that had long been written off by the party.
The bet paid off. Trump won a larger share of young male voters than any Republican in a generation, and the podcast circuit that Rogan anchors, including hosts who welcomed Trump onto their shows in the summer of 2024, was credited with delivering a decisive slice of the electorate. The strategy even acquired a name: the podcast election, in which long-form conversations replaced rallies and advertisements as the way to reach voters who live their lives on their phones. Rogan was not just a participant in that strategy. He was its most important validator.
That history is what makes his break so significant. Rogan is not a Democratic commentator, and he has not become one. He has said repeatedly that he hates politics, and that he dislikes what it does to the country. But he has also been willing to criticize Trump in public when he believes the president has gone too far, and his criticism of the Iran war and the immigration crackdown predates the midterm defeat. The difference now is that he is tying those criticisms to an electoral outcome, and telling his audience that the policies cost the party the election.
Other podcasters who backed Trump in 2024 have also grown quiet or shifted away from politics since the midterm defeat, according to multiple reports, and the silence across that world has become a story in itself. The hosts who once competed to welcome the president onto their shows have had little to say about the results, and some have avoided timely political discussion altogether. Rogan's decision to break that silence, and to do so with a verdict as blunt as the one he delivered, sets him apart from the rest of the group, and it signals that the reckoning inside the podcast world may be only beginning.
Presidential Approval Rating: Why the Numbers Matter
The approval rating matters because it shapes everything that comes next. A president at 32 percent approval, facing a Congress controlled by the opposition, has little leverage to pass legislation, and his party has little incentive to follow him into another fight. The midterm results already showed that dynamic in action: voters who had backed Trump in 2024 turned away from his party in large numbers, and the swing among young men was the sharpest single movement in the electorate. If that shift holds, the coalition that won Trump the White House in 2024 will not be there to defend him in the fights ahead.
The numbers also matter because of who is delivering the message. Rogan's audience is not the traditional political press, and it is not the Democratic base. It is the same young, male, politically disengaged audience that Trump courted so aggressively in 2024, and that the party will need again in the next election. When Rogan tells that audience that the administration lost most of the country, he is not repeating a Democratic talking point. He is telling his own listeners that their verdict has already been delivered, and that the reasons for it are the war and the crackdown.
The White House has not responded directly to Rogan's remarks, and there is little it can say that would improve the situation. The president's approval rating is a matter of public record, and the midterm results are not in dispute. The administration's defenders can argue that the polls will recover, and that the economy or a foreign policy success will turn the numbers around, but the trend since the election has pointed in the opposite direction. The four-point drop in the Economist/YouGov survey came after the vote, not before it, which suggests that voters are still absorbing the result rather than moving on from it.
Who Is Leading in the Polls Right Now: What Comes Next
The question now is whether the midterm verdict hardens into a permanent break, or whether Trump can rebuild the coalition that carried him to victory. The early signs are not encouraging for the White House. The president is heading to Asia this week for a summit in China, where he will meet Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and he does so as a weakened figure, his party routed at home and his movement facing an open debate about its future. The trip was meant to be a display of strength. Instead, it will be watched as a test of how much authority a lame-duck president still carries abroad.
At home, the consequences are already taking shape. The new Democratic majorities in Congress will take control in January, and they have already signaled that they intend to investigate the administration aggressively, from the war in Iran to the immigration crackdown that Rogan cited. The president's nominees, including his pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, face uncertain votes in a Senate that will soon be in Democratic hands. And inside the Republican Party, the fight over who leads the party after Trump has already begun, with the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee contested and the 2028 succession openly discussed.
Rogan's remarks do not decide any of that, but they do capture the mood of a moment. The podcaster who helped Trump win the voters who mattered most in 2024 has now told those same voters that the party lost them, and lost most of the country with them. Whether the party listens will determine whether the midterm defeat was a setback or the start of something larger. For now, the polls and the podcaster agree on one thing: the president's standing has never been lower, and the coalition that carried him to power is fraying in full view.
Source: USA Today