Trump has lost his advantage on inflation and immigration

In three short months, the president has squandered his position on the two main issues voters elected him to address

I’m writing this short article to update a chart I posted last week with some new numbers, and to provide additional commentary on the matter at hand.

The chart in question shows Donald Trump’s job approval rating overall and split out for key issues. As you’ll see, the public is now sharply opposed to the president on most of the issues in the news. Trump has a -22 approval on inflation and the cost of living, for example (probably the biggest factor in his victory last November), and is 15 points underwater on trade (tariff policy is wreaking havoc on the economy).

And, factoring in the new polling, Trump has now lost the advantage he held on his as-of-yet strongest issue, immigration. Let’s look at the data.

I originally posted the chart in question in this Chart of the Week article last Friday:

Chart of the week: Trump is losing voters on the economy

The chart, and the piece more broadly, kicked off a healthy discussion online about which issue Democrats should focus on — immigration or the economy — which I also commented on in this short follow-up piece late Friday morning:

Should Democrats focus on immigration or the economy?

At this point, a few key polls have been released this week that prompted Adam Carlson and me to update the chart and data for you. The most notable of these polls is from YouGov/The Economist, which shows approval of Trump on immigration now as bad or worse than at this point in the president’s first term. More commentary on that below.

So, here’s the updated chart:

If you want to share this chart, you can screenshot it, download a .PNG file, or embed it in your own articles using the ‘Embed’ button on the panel footer.

---

Public opinion is malleable!

Apart from providing fresh data for the internet, I also wanted to update this chart to make a narrow but important point: Public opinion can change!

The discussion about this chart last week started when a certain contingent of center-left “do popular stuff” political writers wanted to use it to argue that Democrats “raising the salience” of immigration as an issue were making a mistake. They came to this conclusion because the immigration line above is higher than the economy, and especially the inflation line. Presumably, then, focusing on stuff like the kidnapping of legal residents to a foreign torture facility in El Salvador was a strategic blunder. As James Carville said, Democrats should just shut up and sit on their hands.

OK, to be generous to the analysts, that’s what the chart says — but it is not enough in isolation to defend the point those writers were making. That’s what my follow-up article was about. In it, I raised a simple idea… Hey, what if parties can overstep public opinion, and highlighting those oversteps can actually move opinion?

That seems to be exactly what has happened. Since April 16, according to YouGov’s data, Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has fallen by 10 points. That matches up neatly with the timeline of Trump refusing to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to America: the White House meeting between Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was last Monday, April 15.

YouGov’s chart here:

Take a moment to really process what this chart shows. According to YouGov, Trump is now doing just as poorly on immigration as he was during his first term. The President has lost all the ground he gained on immigration from 2021 to Jan. 2025. On the issue voters elected him to tackle, Trump has overstepped so severely/executed so poorly that the average voter now disapproves, by 5 points, of his performance.

The average of polls is a little more favorable to Trump than this, but that’s mostly because it includes a good amount of data released before the Abrego Garcia case really blew up in the news. And by a 22-point margin, 50% to 28%, Americans say the government should return Abrego Garcia to his home in Maryland. Only half of Republicans agree with the president’s position!

What you get at Strength In Numbers is smart analysis of polling and politics that isn’t available anywhere else

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it’s clear that highlighting the unpopularity of the Trump administration’s position on KAG caused the president’s overall issue approval to sink. Fine, but the YouGov poll isn’t the data we had last Friday — Maybe our opinions should have been different?

I say no, since it was frankly easy to see coming if you looked at opinions on immigration even a little beyond the surface-level data, or thought through how people form opinions on politics and then express them to pollsters. Based on the data we had at the time, the Trump administration was already clearly overstepping the public’s support for things like deporting convicted violent criminals who came here illegally, and sending the military to the border to increase enforcement.

In fact, at this point, returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. would rank as one of the most popular policies in America. Overall immigration approval be damned.