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In the last few days, the Trump administration has released intelligence that could serve as a justification for some form of military intervention in Cuba. Axios reported that the Cuban government was considering preemptive drone strikes against the United States. The Department of Justice has issued an indictment for former Cuban president Raúl Castro related to events that happened 30 years ago, which could serve as a pretext for a military operation similar to the one that removed Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the island a national security threat.

So, what do Americans actually think about Cuba, and military interventions more generally? This week on The Trendline, we dig into the polls to find out how the public is feeling about America’s relationship with the world, and in particular, our island neighbor.

Polls are mixed on how Americans think about our actions on the world stage. According to a Siena University/The New York Times poll (May 11 - 15, 2026), 54 percent of registered voters said they agreed more that we “should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate more on problems here at home,” while 41 percent said they agreed more that it’s “best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs in order to maintain American security and prosperity.”

Democrats and independents were more likely to say America should focus more attention here at home: 56 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of independents said they agreed more with the first statement. But 52 percent of Republicans said they agreed more with the second statement (probably because their party is currently in charge of foreign policy).

This question, however, might overstate support for American isolationism. The wording provides a lot of information to respondents: phrases like “concentrate on problems here at home” and “American security and prosperity” can serve as nudges to poll takers, particularly in a charged partisan environment. A simpler version of the question, asked by YouGov/The Economist (May 15 - 18, 2026) gets very different responses.

Asked if the U.S. should “take an active part in world affairs or stay out of world affairs,” 47 percent of Americans preferred the U.S. taking an active part, while 31 percent said the U.S. should stay out. And in this version of the question, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans agreed with the active role (52 and 57 percent, respectively). Only independents preferred the U.S. staying out of world affairs, with 37 percent taking the isolationist position and 35 percent saying the U.S. should be active.

When it comes to foreign military interventions specifically, polling generally shows opposition. In a different YouGov survey (May 15 - 18, 2026), 43 percent of Americans said that U.S. foreign military interventions more often worsen situations in the countries where they occur, while just 19 percent said they improve the situation on the ground, consistent with previous polling on the topic. And in a YouGov/The Economist poll from late March, 54 percent of Americans said the U.S. should use military force less often than we do now, while just 5 percent said we should use military force more often (another 28 percent said that we should use force as often as we do now, and 13 percent were unsure).

Against that backdrop, it’s perhaps unsurprising that pursuit of regime change in Cuba isn’t particularly popular. According to a poll from Change Research, among those that are following the news about Cuba (about 66 percent of respondents), just 39 percent said they supported regime change in Cuba, while 51 percent were opposed. This is notable, as those that are following the news are perhaps more likely to have strong feelings about Cuba and the Cuban government.

When poll questions directly mention military involvement, the numbers get much worse for the pro-regime change side. In the March YouGov/The Economist poll, just 22 percent of Americans said they supported using military force to overthrow the government in Cuba, while 55 percent were opposed (23 percent said they weren’t sure).

In a January survey from Ipsos/The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Americans were generally unsupportive of the use of military force to make political change in other countries, including Cuba, though were more supportive of using force to protect our allies.

Seventy-eight percent of Americans said they opposed the use of U.S. troops to overthrow the Cuban government in particular. And 70 percent said it is generally unacceptable to use military force to change the political leadership of another country.

Outside of military intervention, though, views on Cuba are a bit more muddled. In the YouGov poll, just 9 percent of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of the Cuban government, while 60 percent had an unfavorable opinion. But even given this distaste for the government of Cuba, 65 percent said they had a favorable opinion of the Cuban people, while 9 percent viewed the population unfavorably.

As to the potential justifications of military intervention based on Cuba’s potentially being a national security threat, only 5 percent said they thought Cuba was “an immediate and serious threat to the U.S.,” so that probably won’t hold water with the public. And many Americans think we should be a bit nicer to Cuba: 41 percent said the U.S. treats Cuba too harshly, compared to 11 percent who said the U.S. is too lenient (another 22 percent said our treatment of Cuba is about right, and 26 percent were undecided). In addition, 57 percent said they would approve of the U.S. having diplomatic relations with the nation, while just 11 percent would disapprove.

In the March YouGov/The Economist poll, voters didn’t seem quite sure of what to make of our current actions in Cuba. Asked if they supported the oil blockade on the island, 24 percent said they did, 38 percent said they didn’t, and 38 percent said they weren’t sure. In a March poll from Harris/Harvard CAPS, voters were asked about a variety of policy approaches related to Cuba; the most popular approaches were to pursue diplomatic negotiations (27 percent support) and provide humanitarian aid to the Cuban people (26 percent support). Only 16 percent said the U.S. should consider military options if the situation worsens.

Still, the Trump administration may have some important backing for action against Cuba: Cuban Americans. In an April poll of South Florida Cuban Americans from The Tarrance Group/Bendixen & Amandi International/The Miami Herald, 79 percent said that they supported some form of military intervention in Cuba. And in a March poll of Latino voters by Florida International University/The Latino Public Opinion Forum, Latinos of Cuban origin stood out as particularly supportive of Trump and the Republican party: 53 percent of Cubans approved of Trump, compared to a 31 percent approval rating among Latinos overall. And of all national origins in the poll, Cubans were the only group who showed a Republican advantage on the generic ballot

Taken all together, polling suggests that the public overall probably prefers a Cuba approach closer to that of former President Barack Obama: normalizing diplomatic relations and increasing cooperation with the nation, rather than the approach taken by both Trump and former President Joe Biden of hostility and sanctions. It appears, for now, they will not get their wish.

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Other polling nuggets

• According to Gallup (May 1 - 17, 2026), Americans across the political spectrum are souring on the economy. The Gallup economic confidence index has dropped to -45, the lowest level since the inflation crisis in Summer 2022. Just 16 percent of Americans rate economic conditions as excellent or good, while 49 percent rate them as poor and 34 percent as “only fair.” Worsening opinions about the economy cross political lines: Republicans’ economic confidence has dropped from a second Trump term high of +68 in August 2025 to +22 now. In the same time frame, independents’ confidence dropped from -35 to -58, and Democrats’ confidence dropped from -70 to -80. As further evidence of increasing bipartisan pessimism about the economy, in an AP-NORC poll (May 14 - 18, 2026), Trump’s approval rating on the economy has fallen to 63 percent among Republicans, down from a high of 79 percent in February, just prior to the Iran war.

• According to a survey from Siena University/The New York Times (May 11 - 15, 2026), Democrats are frustrated with their own party. Among potential Democratic voters, 45 percent said they were satisfied with the Democratic Party, while 53 percent were dissatisfied. Seventy-five percent said the Democratic Party should reposition, with 47 percent saying it should move to the center and 28 percent saying it should move to the left; just 19 percent said they thought it should not move in either direction. Still, these frustrations don’t seem to be bleeding into voters’ plans for November. Despite their dissatisfaction with the party writ large, 95 percent of these voters said they plan to vote for the Democratic candidate in November, and less than 1 percent said they would support the Republican. And though the Republican Party has advantages in terms of satisfaction among its own voters (68 percent of Republican voters are satisfied with the Republican Party), Democrats seem a bit more enthusiastic about November: 47 percent said they are “almost certain” to vote, compared with 41 percent among Republicans.

• According to Quinnipiac University (May 14 - 18, 2026), 36 percent of Americans believe that the Pentagon’s newly released UFO files show evidence of intelligent life on other planets. Forty-two percent don’t believe the files are evidence of aliens, and 22 percent aren’t sure. The most skeptical group is Republicans, 50 percent of whom say that the files do not show evidence of alien intelligence, while 31 percent believe they do. Independents are most likely to express belief, with 38 percent believing there’s evidence of alien life, and 38 percent disbelieving.

Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 11:00 AM Eastern on May 22, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

After months of hovering around a 5-point lead, the Democrats have grown their margin on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot to +6 this week. At writing, 47.4 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall — similar to the 47.2 percent we reported in our last newsletter — versus 41.5 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating among U.S. adults hit a new all-time low of 36.5 percent in our average this week, while the percent saying they disapprove rose to 60.2 percent for the first time. The net rating – rounding down on our site for the first time to -24 – is also a new low.

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On Thursday, April 30, Maine Governor Janet Mills ended her bid for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, leaving Graham Platner — a 41-year-old oyster farmer, Marine Corps veteran, and progressive newcomer — as the all-but-certain Democratic nominee against Republican Senator Susan Collins this fall. Mills, who is 78, had entered the race in October with the backing of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a head start in name recognition, and a pitch built around her record as a two-term governor in a swing state.

By April, multiple polls had Mills trailing badly. A late-March Emerson College survey put Platner up 55 to 28 percent. A University of New Hampshire poll in February had him up 64 to 26. Her late-stage attack ads, focused on Platner’s old social media posts, didn’t move the polls. Given these numbers, as well as a significant fundraising deficit, her exit wasn’t really a surprise.

Despite his baggage (Platner recently had a tattoo common among Neo-Nazis covered up, and made misogynistic and racist remarks in old social media posts), plenty of factors boosted Platner. He is an effective fundraiser, credibly makes an anti-establishment case that is popular among both the progressive left and MAGA right, and scored big early endorsements from high-profile U.S. Senators including Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. But one other factor may have been the most important: Platner is young, while Mills is old. The race became, as Platner framed it, a contest between old and new ideas. And when it comes to age, Americans overwhelmingly favor the new.

In a new Marist University/NPR/PBS News poll conducted late April, 8 in 10 Americans said they support both maximum age limits and term limits for members of Congress. The agreement crosses party lines, with 78 percent of Democrats backing both ideas, and between 80 and 90 percent of Republicans favoring age caps and term limits. Older voters were also about as likely to favor age caps as younger ones.

This survey echoed findings from a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted earlier this year. In that survey, 89 percent of U.S. adults agreed that members of Congress should have term limits, and 85 percent said they should face a mandatory retirement age. Seventy-nine percent agreed with the broader statement that elected officials in Washington are too old to represent most Americans, including 76 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of Democrats.

But in that poll, Americans favored age limits not just for members of Congress, but every federal office. Seventy-one percent of adults favored an age limit for president, including 81 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans. Support for age limits for House and Senate members is roughly the same. And regarding the Supreme Court — from which justices retire on average well into their 80s — 68 percent of Americans favor age limits.

When it comes to winning elections, the sweet spot may be younger than you think. A YouGov poll (March 27 - 30, 2026) found a plurality of adults say the age at which Congresspeople “are generally best able to fulfill the duties of serving” is between 40 and 49. Zero percent of respondents said the ideal age for a member of Congress is above 70, and 80 percent said 75 years is “too old” to run.

YouGov also asked which prominent figures in government respondents thought were too old to do the job. Joe Biden topped the list at 82 percent, but a majority said the same thing about Donald Trump (57 percent) and Bernie Sanders (also 57 percent).

Mills’ effective defeat in the Maine Democratic primary for Senate shows how toxic age has become in modern politics. Given the choice between a younger and older candidate, YouGov’s poll found, 46 percent of Americans chose young and only 11 percent chose old. Platner now heads to a general election against incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins, who at 73 is seeking a sixth term in Washington. She will have to head off the same attacks that sank the current governor.

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Other polling nuggets

• Last week, King Charles III made a state visit to the United States, an occasion met with much pomp and circumstance (and media coverage). Americans, however, don’t seem much to care: In an Ipsos poll (May 1 - 3, 2026), just 25 percent said they had been following the story very or somewhat closely. For comparison, 74 percent said they were following stories about gas prices and the cost of living, and 46 percent said they were following stories about redistricting. And when it comes to the U.S.-British relationship, Americans appear to be moving away from the United Kingdom. In May 2024, 48 percent told Ipsos that they agreed there is a “special relationship” between the two nations. That number is down to 34 percent in the most recent survey — and the number who disagree has risen from 5 to 13 percent (the rest either neither agree nor disagree or are unsure).

• Americans are split on the recent Supreme Court ruling that changed its interpretation of Section II of the Voting Rights Act, according to a survey by YouGov Blue/The Downballot (Apr. 30 - May 4, 2026). Given a description of the case and outcome, 34 percent said they generally agreed with the ruling, 46 percent said they generally disagreed, 12 percent said they neither agreed nor disagreed, and another 7 percent said they weren’t sure. Asked whether the Voting Rights Act was still needed to protect against racial discrimination in elections, a majority (55 percent) said yes, 31 percent said no, and 14 percent were undecided.

• Voters are not happy with Trump’s foreign policy decisions, according to a recent Marist University/NPR/PBS News poll (Apr. 27 - 30, 2026). Sixty-two percent of registered voters told the pollster that Trump’s decisions as president had weakened the United States’ role on the world stage, while 38 percent said his decisions had strengthened it. Among Democrats, 94 percent said his decisions had weakened the U.S.’ standing; 67 percent of independents and 22 percent of Republicans agreed.

• Forty percent of Americans say the biggest sin of their countrymen is greed, according to new YouGov polling (May 7, 2026). Asked which of the Seven Deadly Sins (a Catholic concept dating back to the 4th century) Americans commit the most, 40 percent said greed, far more than the next highest responses of gluttony (11 percent), lust (9 percent), and pride and envy (tied at 8 percent). When it comes to their own sins, though, Americans are far less likely to confess: just 5 percent said the sin they commit the most is greed, behind pride and lust (tied at 12 percent) and envy and sloth (tied at 10 percent).

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 10:00 AM Eastern on May 8, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +5 (after rounding) over the last week, with 47.4 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall versus 42.1 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating among U.S. adults held steady at an all time low of 36.7 percent this week, while the percent of Americans who disapprove of the job he is doing rose within the margin of error to 59.5 percent.

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Throughout the early spring this year, there was a persistent worry among Democrats that they could get “locked out” of the California gubernatorial election. California is one of only three states that run all-party primaries, in which candidates of all parties run on the same primary ballot, and some number of the top candidates move on to a runoff election in November (the other two are Alaska and Washington). In California, only two candidates make it through to the general election, and until the end of March, the two leading candidates in polling were Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco.

But things have changed since March. We’ve seen President Donald Trump endorse one of the top two Republicans, more than one Democratic drop out, and significant changes in the polls. As of early May, it now looks like the Democrats could actually lock the Republicans out of the November runoff, rather than the other way around.

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Before we get into that, let’s take a look at what the problem was for Democrats in the first place. When the race got underway, too many Democratic candidates in the race were splitting up the Democratic vote, with no one candidate able to gain an advantage. Indeed, there will be 24 Democrats on the primary ballot in June, but just 12 Republicans (and an additional 25 candidates with either no party preference or another party affiliation).

Of those candidates, pollsters identified roughly eight Democrats that they generally include in their polls as plausible candidates, but just two Republicans. Through the end of March, both of those Republicans were polling in double digits, while three Democrats were, and the other five Democrats were consistently peeling off low single-digits.

But as April got underway, things began to shift. On Monday, April 6, Trump endorsed Hilton. Some Democrats speculated that this would lead to a consolidation in the Republican vote in the race, and while Hilton has gained a few points in the polls since then, Bianco hasn’t really budged. On April 4, our polling average showed Hilton with 16.8 percent and Bianco with 13.6 percent; As of 6:00 PM Eastern on May 6, 2026,, those candidates are polling at 18.4 percent and 13.2 percent, respectively.

Then, amid a flurry of scandal, top-polling Democrat Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race on April 13. At the time, he had been the highest polling Democrat, at 14.3 percent, trailed closely by Tom Steyer at 14 percent. His exit seems to have redounded primarily to the benefit of Xavier Becerra, who shot up from 3.9 percent on April 13 to 14.6 percent today. Steyer, who had already been steadily climbing in the polls since early March, has also picked up a point, and now sits at 15 percent.

Hilton continues to lead the top two Democrats by 3-4 points, with Bianco trailing them by 1-2 points.

Alright, so if Hilton is still leading, you might ask me: why would you think the Democrats could lock the Republicans out? Wouldn’t you expect the polling leader to win?

Well, yes and no. As we’ve written in the past, primary polling is notoriously hard, so there’s reason to exercise caution, especially when the polling lead is only a couple of points. But there are two reasons to think that the top two Democratic candidates could continue to rise between now and the June primary, surpassing Hilton and locking the GOP out of the runoff in November.

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Reason #1: More Democrats are still on the fence.

Generally speaking, it’s fair to assume that statewide, California is split roughly 60-40, with about 60 percent of votes going to Democrats and 40 percent to Republicans in recent elections. So if we expect that 60 percent of the votes in the primary will go to Democrats and 40 percent to Republicans, we can get a back-of-the-envelope calculation for how many voters from each party still haven’t made up their minds. On average, in polls conducted since Swalwell’s exit, 49 percent of the vote is going to Democrats, and 32 percent to Republicans.1 In our 60-40 universe, that means there’s still 11 percent of the electorate we would expect to choose a Democrat, and 8 percent we would expect to choose a Republican.

Of course, that three point difference between Democrats on the fence and Republicans on the fence doesn’t seem like very much. But again, the polling leader in this race is only leading by three percentage points to begin with, so we’re dealing with pretty thin margins already.

More importantly, the voters who show up for the primary election in June may be more Democratic than the usual 60-40 split among the general electorate.

In the redistricting referendum in California last December, the Democratic-aligned “Yes” side won 64-36. In other primaries that have been held so far in 2026, Democrats have turned out in much larger numbers than we’ve seen in previous primaries. For example, in the Ohio primary in 2022, Republicans were ahead of Democrats more than two-to-one in turnout in the Senate race, with over 1 million GOP voters and just over 500,000 Democrats. But in the primary in Ohio this week, Republicans appear to have barely led Democrats in turnout: just over 800,000 Republicans voted, and just under 800,000 Democrats did (note: these results are not yet final).

So let’s revisit the on-the-fence numbers with this in mind. If Democrats have a slightly higher than usual turnout advantage in June, say, 63-37 rather than 60-40, then an average of 14 percent of voters that currently have not chosen a candidate would likely choose a Democrat, while just 5 percent would be expected to choose a Republican. If Becerra and Steyer each get 5 percent of those Democratic fence-sitters (and the remaining 4 percent split between the other Democrats), while Hilton and Bianco split their 5 percent equally, that’s enough to push the topline into a 3-way tie. Any additional turnout advantage makes it even likelier for the two top Democrats to push ahead of Hilton.

Reason #2: Voters like voting for winners.

As we’ve seen Steyer and Becerra rise in the wake of Swalwell’s departure, we’ve seen another phenomenon begin to emerge in the polls: Democrat Katie Porter’s slow decline.

While Porter hasn’t collapsed, her vote share has been steadily ticking down in the polling average since late April. On April 13, Porter’s average was 9.8 percent; after Swalwell’s exit she ticked up a bit to 10.4 throughout mid-April, and has slowly been dropping ever since. Her current polling average is 9.2 percent, about half a point lower than where she was when Swalwell dropped out.

Now, this decline isn’t all that significant. One could argue that it’s all margin of error stuff, and I’m sensitive to that argument. But the fact that it’s been consistent in one direction for several weeks doesn’t bode well for her candidacy. And it could be the beginning of what we commonly see in these sorts of multi-candidate races: voters consolidating toward the end of the race around candidates they view as having the potential to win.

While not a primary, one very clear example of this phenomenon can be seen in the Oregon gubernatorial race in 2022. That race featured three candidates: Democrat Tina Kotek, Republican Christine Drazan, and independent former Democrat Betsy Johnson. In the early stages of the race, particularly in September 2022, there was significant fretting among Democrats that Johnson’s presence in the race could cost them the seat in November; Johnson was consistently polling in the high teens and low twenties throughout September. As a former Democrat, much of that vote share was pulling from Kotek, and Drazan held a polling lead throughout that period.

But then, October hit. Voters started to get serious about choosing their candidates. And almost immediately, Johnson’s poll numbers began to crash. By November, she was polling in the single digits, and Kotek had taken the lead over Drazan in the average. Ultimately, Johnson earned 8.6 percent of the vote in the election, less than half of where she’d been polling in September.

Well, the time has come in California. We’re about one month out from the primary, and voters are starting to get serious about choosing their candidates. This could mean that as the last month goes on, voters who have been telling pollsters they plan to vote for lower-polling Democratic candidates like Porter or Democrat Matt Mahan may go the way of Betsy Johnson voters in Oregon, and shift their support to one of the top two polling candidates. On average, 20 percent of voters say they plan to vote for a Democrat other than Becerra or Steyer; if half of these switch to one of the two Democratic leaders, that’s another 10 percent of the votes to split between the two.

Ultimately, nobody knows what will happen in California in June. With 61 candidates on the ballot and five candidates polling at 9 percent or above, there’s a lot of fluidity still in this race. But there’s an outside chance that the combination of turnout advantages and consolidation could push Hilton off the November ballot. At this point, Republicans getting locked out seems more likely than Democrats missing the November ballot.

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Footnotes

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It’s budget season again on Capitol Hill, and members of congress have been spending the last few weeks debating a variety of proposals, including ending the DHS shutdown and funding ICE (Trump signed a bill to end the shutdown and fund DHS on April 30, 2026), significant increases to the Pentagon’s budget, and big cuts to the EPA, among other things. So this week on The Trendline, we’re checking in on what Americans prioritize for their tax dollars, and how they feel about federal spending overall.

When it comes to some of the proposed spending cuts being considered, it appears that the GOP may be on the wrong side of public opinion. In an RMG Research/Napolitan News Service poll (Apr. 27 - 28, 2026), voters opposed cuts to the Department of Education budget by 30 percentage points (62 percent to 32 percent), and also opposed cuts to the TSA by 36 percentage points (63 percent to 27 percent). As to the Democratic position that funding for ICE should be cut, voters agree by a much smaller margin; 51 percent favor cutting ICE funding, while 44 percent oppose.

And on increases in funding for the Pentagon, Congress may also be out on a limb. Asked in a Verasight/The Argument poll (Apr. 20 - 23, 2026) about several categories of spending, the military was by far the category voters were most likely to say the government spends too much on.

Moreover, in order to pay for the increased spending on the Pentagon, the GOP has been mulling additional cuts to health care, which was already significantly cut in last year’s budget reconciliation bill (officially titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”). Republican leaders say that these cuts are actually intended to target wasteful spending and fraud, while opponents say such fraud is not common, and cuts will hurt Americans, especially Medicaid recipients.

As to what Americans think, it’s a bit more complicated. In the RMG Research/Napolitan News survey, 21 percent of voters said that most federal spending is waste and fraud, and another 44 percent said a lot of it is. Twenty-four percent said that some federal spending is waste and fraud, and only 5 percent said not very much spending is fraudulent. Against that backdrop, it’s possible that Republicans will be able to sell their idea that cuts are really just eliminating fraudulent uses of taxpayer dollars.

On the other hand, as we see in the Verasight/The Argument poll, 67 percent of voters said that the government spends too little on health care, so it may be tough to get the public on board with additional cuts. And possibly more troubling for the GOP: even when you get more specific, their position remains unpopular. In a Data for Progress survey (Apr. 3 - 6, 2026), voters were asked about a variety of specific policies that have been proposed as means to reduce Medicaid spending; all of these were underwater by over 30 percentage points.

In general, the public seems to prioritize programs that directly benefit Americans. Asked in a YouGov/The Economist poll (Apr. 24 - 27, 2026) whether the federal government should increase, decrease, or not change spending levels on a variety of broad priorities, the most favored increases include direct benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as general social welfare programs like veterans’ spending and education.

Of course, this spending debate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For the first time since World War II, the U.S. federal debt exceeds 100 percent of GDP, according to the Wall Street Journal. And on the face of it, Americans are concerned about the debt and deficit. In a new survey from Global Strategy Group/North Star Opinion Research for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 88 percent of voters said they were concerned about the national debt’s impact on interest rates, and 92 percent said they were concerned about the national debt’s impact on inflation. Moreover, 83 percent said that a candidate “having a plan to address the national debt” would be a factor in determining their 2026 support. Sixty-six percent said that they thought the national debt would get worse over the next few years, while just 28 percent said they thought it would get better.

These numbers, of course, sound like a dire warning for politicians as they prepare to advance what may well be another deficit increase. But under the hood, it’s not quite so clear that this is as big of a political problem as the toplines suggest. For starters, the questions about concerns related to inflation and interest rates were preceded in the poll by the following:

As you may know, economists from across the ideological spectrum agree that the rising national debt can increase inflation and interest rates, which makes things like goods, services and transportation more expensive for consumers.

Primed to already believe high debt levels impact inflation and interest rates, respondents gave the expected answers.

As to the federal debt being a factor in voter’s choices in 2026, there’s no doubt that it probably does matter to some voters. Asked in a vacuum whether having a plan to tackle the debt might make a difference, it’s quite easy for respondents to say yes. But in truth, government spending generally doesn’t top the list of priorities for most Americans. In YouGov/The Economist polls over the last few years, when asked which is the most important issue, the issues of “taxes and government spending” has never exceeded 10 percent of respondents, about the same number as say that national security and foreign policy is their top issue. Dominating voters’ concerns in that time period: inflation and prices (though “civil rights and civil liberties” also had a bit of a moment in the summer and fall of 2025).

Finally, on the poll result showing 66 percent said that they thought the national debt would get worse over the next few years: this is more or less the same as the percentage of respondents who have saying this for over a decade. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for federal debt reduction, has been conducting monthly surveys stretching back to late 2012, including this most recent April poll. In those surveys, an average of 29 percent of respondents have said they expect the debt to get better over the next few years, while 61 percent said they expect it to get worse. That’s not too different from the 28-66 spread in the latest survey. In fact, only one thing seems to have moved opinion on this in the decade-plus of data: Donald Trump being elected.

To be clear, such optimism was short-lived on both occasions. After both the 2016 and 2024 elections, the survey briefly showed voters moving to near-parity on the question of whether the debt will get better or worse over the next few years, but voters quickly returned to their general ambient grumpiness about the debt situation. Still, voters may harbor some hope that the right politician might be able to improve the situation sometime in the future. But after two terms of failing to get the budget deficit down — in fact, the president has increased the deficit dramatically in both stints as president — perhaps Americans have learned he’s not the man for this particular job.

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Other polling nuggets

• A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll (Apr. 24 - 28, 2026) finds that the public is opposed to President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom: 56 percent of Americans oppose tearing down the East Wing to make room for it, while just 28 percent support the project. Strong opposition outweighs strong support by about 3-to-1, and the numbers are essentially unchanged from a poll conducted in October. Voters also oppose Trump’s proposed 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery with 52 percent opposed and just 21 percent in favor, and his idea to add his signature to paper currency was opposed by more than 5-to-1.

• A new KFF Health Tracking poll (Apr. 14 - 19, 2026) finds that the cost of health care continues to top Americans’ list of economic concerns, even as worries about gas prices have climbed since the war in Iran began. Sixty-four percent of adults said they’re worried about being able to afford health care costs, and the same share said they were worried about gas and other transportation costs, up from 52 percent in January. Health care affordability is also poised to play a real political role this fall: 55 percent of voters said it will have a “major impact” on their decision to vote, and 61 percent said it will affect which party’s candidate they support. Voters trust Democrats over Republicans to address health care costs (37 to 26 percent) and prescription drug costs (33 to 26 percent).

• Most Americans don’t want politicians drawing their own districts. In a new Economist/YouGov poll (Apr. 24 - 27, 2026), 71 percent of Americans said that states should not be allowed to draw congressional districts in a way that intentionally favors one party, while just 7 percent said it should be allowed — with bipartisan opposition from 74 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents, and 69 percent of Republicans. The same poll also asked about mail voting, where Americans are unsympathetic to Donald Trump’s proposed restrictions: a 58 percent majority said mail voting should either be made easier or kept the same, while just 33 percent said it should be made harder or eliminated entirely.

• For young adults today, moving back in with mom and dad is increasingly the norm. According to a new Ipsos poll conducted for Thrivent Financial (Mar. 24 - Apr. 3, 2026), 29 percent of Americans aged 18-35 have moved back in with their parents at least once as an adult, and another 32 percent never left in the first place. Among those who came back, 55 percent said it was financially necessary. Twenty percent of those aged 18-35 who haven’t bought a home say they don’t expect to ever purchase one. The good news for young adults: most parents say they are willing to cut down on personal expenses or savings goals to help support their adult children at home. (Your poll columnist would welcome a home cooked meal at his mother’s table.)

• And to end on an optimistic note: a new Gallup survey (Mar. 2 - 18, 2026) finds Americans think kindness is alive and well. Sixty percent of U.S. adults said they see people treating others with kindness and respect “often” or “very often,” while 65 percent reported personally experiencing an act of kindness from someone in their community at least once in the past seven days, and nearly three-quarters (73 percent) said most Americans are very or somewhat kind.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 10:00 AM Eastern on May 1, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +5 (after rounding) over the last week, with 47.3 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall versus 42.3 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating among U.S. adults held steady at an all-time low of 36.7 percent this week, while the percent of Americans who disapprove of the job he is doing rose to 59.3 percent. As of May 1 at 10:00 AM, this is the first time Trump’s rating has rounded to -23.

These averages update fresh on the 50+1 website with every new poll we add to our database.

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In the context of horse race polls, campaigns are stable, polls are noisy, and your average should really be quite steady. A trend line that twitches at every new survey is committing two errors: first, it’s reacting to noise in the data, a statistical error; and second, it’s really not adding anything journalistically anymore: readers can already see what the polls say, so an average should be able to tell them something more than whatever the latest survey showed.

Every once in a while, however, something actually happens that causes opinions to change. Campaign events like a candidate dropping out, a new scandal breaking, or a bad (or good!) debate performance can and do shape competitive races. A polling average that doesn’t move accordingly is missing something.

I’ve been thinking about this recently in the context of our average of polls for the upcoming California gubernatorial primary. Our polling average, as it appeared on April 28, 2026, appears below:

This is a reasonable average for a primary campaign that doesn’t have any major events going on. But that’s not what’s happening here. Former U.S. House Rep. Eric Swalwell suspended his campaign on April 13, following allegations of sexual misconduct from multiple women. More than two weeks later, our model still has him at 11.8% — within a point of where he’d been all spring (because Swalwell is still on the ballot, we have kept him on our average).

Yet support for Swalwell has actually plunged. Surveys taken after he suspended his campaign show him in the low single digits.

This model error is an interesting problem, from a statistics perspective, and worth walking readers through, because the same thing happens in every primary cycle and we want to use a polling average that can react to surprises when they happen. The fix we have come up with is also pretty satisfying, we think.

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Why the model gets stuck

First, why is the average so stable in the first place?

The polling averages at 50+1 are powered by a statistical model detailed in full here. Each candidate has an underlying level of “true support” that evolves day to day as a random walk over time. Statistically, this is formulated as:

average[today] = average[yesterday] + step[today]

Where step[today] is a number that is drawn from a statistical distribution called a Laplace distribution that looks like this:

This distribution allows for both a higher occurrence of extreme values and a higher concentration of zeroes than the normal or other fat-tailed distribution. We use the Laplace distribution because, as theorized above, we don’t want the polling average to move around too much from day to day — but on days that campaign events happen, we want the average to be able to make big jumps.

We call these jumps ‘steps’ in the statistical parlance. Every day, the polling average is allowed to move up or down by a certain amount, which we call average_change.

Formally,

step[today] ~ laplace(0, average_change)

The parameter average_change controls how much the trend is allowed to move per day. A small value gives a smooth line; a larger one gives a jumpier line. We estimate average_change as a parameter in our statistical model, meaning it’s allowed to have a high value in races where opinions are volatile (hello, CA-Gov!) and a small value in other races. Usually the value is about 0.3 percentage points per day — small enough that the model expects gentle drift in opinion, with very occasional jumps.

Because we are Bayesians here at 50+1, we do not fit this model completely from scratch. Each day’s value for average is softly anchored to a simple exponentially-weighted moving average (EWMA) of the non-partisan polls in a race. This anchor serves two purposes: first, it allows us to incorporate other averaging techniques in our average (we are not perfect); and second, it dramatically speeds up the runtime of the computer program that powers our averages.

So this means that support for a candidate on a given day depends on three variables: the previous day’s level of support, the soft anchor from the EWMA, and today’s new poll observations. In normal times this works beautifully: you get a smooth curve of opinion with medium-sized jumps when a normal campaign event like a debate or a gaffe happens. The model’s estimates are exactly as smooth as you want.

But as any modeler knows, the real world can be quite messy. When a a non-normal event happens that changes the dynamics of a race overnight — we call these “shocks” — two of the variables above become statistical liabilities:

1. The random-walk prior says huge day-to-day moves are unlikely. Because the model’s average_change parameter is fit to account for big campaign shocks in the tails of the distribution, shocks that are even more extreme get washed out as noise.

2. The EWMA anchor still includes old, pre-shock polls, pulling the trend toward the old level. Even if the random walk loosened up, the anchor would yank the trend back.

The normal model that is walking around the world, whistling as it processes a steady stream of data that fits its idea of what a “normal” event is, is caught off guard by the shock.

How do we fix this?

Fix 1: Tell the model when a big campaign event happened, and let the average jump around after

Our first move is to tell the model when shocks occur, and to let it move the average dramatically to account for new polling if it decides to. After a campaign shock, the model inflates the average_change variable so the trend can jump around.

Concretely, we convert the single variable average_change to a vector of individual daily change values (called daily_change) that varies over time, instead of being a single fixed value. Before a shock, daily_change is equal to the value of average_change. But on the day a shock happens, daily_change jumps up by some multiplier value (the default ×10) to let the model move the polling average more. Each subsequent day, the value of daily_change decays exponentially back down to its baseline, returning to the normal level in about 14 days.

By making this change, we allow both a candidate’s average level of support and our certainty about it to change over time. We’ve encoded our prior knowledge from observing campaign events that a big jump is plausible right now.

To be clear, we have not told model what direction to jump, only that a big jump is now possible. The data still drives what direction the model moves, we’ve just temporarily removed the penalty on big jumps that would otherwise get suppressed by even a fat-tailed distribution. (Readers who work in finance will clock this as similar to a stochastic volatility model).

Fix 2: Re-anchor the average to an updated, post-shock prior

But loosening the random walk alone isn’t enough. The model still has its prior trend — the EWMA run on all the polls — that is averaging together a bunch of pre-shock data. This pulls the final trend toward the old one, even with the wider variance on the daily steps.

So on and after a shock day, we calculate an additional new EWMA that only consists of the data taken after the campaign shock. Then we average this new, post-shock EWMA with the usual, full-period EWMA, giving 80% of the weight in that average to the fast-moving EWMA and 20% on the older one.

This 80/20 blend makes sure the post-EWMA average doesn’t get pulled around by noise in polls. If we anchored the new average just to post-shock polls, we would let one or two early polls dictate the new level of the model, which adds a lot of noise to the average. The 20% weight on the full-period EWMA stabilizes the anchor when post-shock data is thin, and its influence shrinks naturally as more post-shock polls accumulate (and as we move away from the shock).

Methodologically this is equivalent to telling the model that the unobserved process changed regimes at the shock date, so older polls are partially informative about the new regime but not fully.

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A newer, faster-moving average — when it’s warranted

To refresh your memory, here is what the old CA gubernatorial primary average looked like:

And here’s the same race, with the same polls, using the new model:

The Swalwell line now does what we would expect it to a priori and takes a sharp drop in mid-April, settling at 3.2% by April 29 — about where the post-scandal polls have him. We also added a new line (in medium-blue color) for Xavier Becerra, the former secretary of health and human services who has gained a lot since Swalwell dropped out. (Our rule of thumb is to include candidates in our polling averages if they are routinely polling above 5%. That wasn’t true of Becerra before Swalwell suspended his campaign, but it is true now.)

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Tunable parameters

To recap for anyone running a similar version of our average at home, we have introduced three new variables that the model can tune appropriately:

• shock_multiplier (default 10): The peak multiplicative factor on the value of average_change on the day a big shock occurred. Higher means bigger jumps in the average.

• shock_decay (default ln(10)/14 ≈ 0.165 per day, or a return to normal variance 2 weeks after the campaign shock): Higher means a shorter window of elevated variance.

• post_shock_weight (default 0.8): weight on the post-shock EMA in the blended anchor. Higher is more responsive, less stable.

Both shock_multiplier and shock_decay are estimated as parameters in our Bayesian model, run in the programming language Stan, with the user-supplied values acting as priors on these values. So the defaults are starting points, not hard settings — the data can pull them in either direction. The post_shock_weight is specified in an ad-hoc way, and we can probably improve the average by testing different values on historical primaries.

Closing thoughts

Coding a polling averages requires making a tradeoff between stability and reactivity, and there is no single model that works perfectly for every race. A model tuned to react quickly to shocks will jitter through ordinary noise; a model tuned for stability will sit through real events.

The best way to resolve this tension is to make the model conditional on whether something has happened — quiet most days, willing to move on the days that count. We have resisted doing this in the past because it means assembling a dataset of campaign shocks over every race we are monitoring, and all the races in our historical polling data. But we think the extra effort is worth the gains in accuracy.

We will now be using this accommodating average for all primary campaigns, and are testing it on general election averages too. We are not immediately planning to move the presidential approval or generic ballot averages over to the model with hard, user-specified shocks, because in our research these polls tend to react more predictably to the historical range of real-world events. But if something does happen, we now have a framework for enabling the same degree of reactivity in those contexts, too.

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This week, we rolled out new averages at FiftyPlusOne of favorability polling for the Democratic and Republican parties, calculated back to January 2025. These averages show ratings of the Democratic Party holding steady (and negative) since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term as president, and views of the Republicans turning sharply south.

Democrats started Trump’s second term with a net rating of -17, 54.6 percent unfavorable to 37.1 percent favorable, and today are rated at -18, 55.3 to 37.0. Republicans, meanwhile, started at -7 (49.4 percent to 42.1 percent) and today score a -16 (55 to 39).

We can use these polls to calculate a “net favorability advantage” for both parties, measured as the difference between the two parties’ net ratings. Numbers above zero mean Democrats have a better net rating than Republicans; numbers below zero mean Republicans have the edge. Here’s what that statistics looks like since Bill Clinton’s presidency:

Party favorability has been a subject of considerable conversation in the media over the last year. Back in July, we wrote about a much-discussed Wall Street Journal poll that put the Democratic Party at a net favorability of -30 and a 19-point deficit against Republicans. That piece made three arguments worth updating here: that the WSJ number was an outlier against the average of polls (Democrats looked more like -10 compared to Republicans); that much of the Democratic favorability deficit comes from in-party disaffection by “very liberal” Democrats who don’t plan to defect at the ballot box; and that party favorability this far from an election has “almost no predictive power” for midterm results.

Out-parties tend to gain ground on favorability

Armed with our new averages, we want to follow up on that last point. One reason favorability is a poor predictor of election results is that it is not the same as vote choice; you can view a party (or candidate) unfavorably and still vote for it (them). Another reason is that favorability numbers move a lot between inauguration and Election Day, in ways that look fairly similar across cycles. Exhibit A of this might be the 2026 election: Democrats had a nearly -10 net favorability disadvantage versus the Republicans in January of 2025, but the difference between the parties’ ratings now is just -1.4.

Since 1992, six cycles have started with a new party taking the White House: Clinton in 1993, George W. Bush in 2001, Obama in 2009, Trump in 2017, Biden in 2021, and Trump again in 2025. (For our purposes here, we will set aside the 2001 cycle because the September 11 terror attacks disrupted first-term favorability dynamics, and basically all other political polling, in ways that don’t generalize.) In the four completed cycles we can compare to, the out-party’s favorability advantage either grew or stayed roughly flat between inauguration and the first midterm. In none of those cycles did it get meaningfully worse.

The magnitudes vary a lot. Republicans entering the Obama administration started at about -36, one of the deepest favorability deficits in the series — and gained nearly 33 points by the 2010 midterm, finishing close to parity. Republicans in 2021 started 21 points down and gained about 17 points by November 2022. Republicans in 1993, barely underwater at -2, gained 7 points by 1994. And the 2017 Democrats — the only out-party in this window to come in with an advantage, at +12 — moved essentially sideways, ending the cycle one point below where they started. That’s within the margin of error.

This pattern is consistent with a simple theory of mean reversion: the more underwater the out-party begins, the bigger the recovery as the in-party absorbs the normal wear and tear of governing.

One methodological note: Our new polling average was a little too jumpy on old, noisy historical data, so for this article we are using a slightly smoother version for modern polling for the sake of comparison. This smoother version tends to soften bounces and reversions from running an average over sparse data, but also dampens spikes after elections and other big events.

According to our smoother average, Democrats have gained about four points of favorability advantage since Trump’s inauguration in January. That’s broadly in line with historical expectations: the predominant pattern in the data is mean reversion, and because Democrats started this cycle only 6 points down on our average, we shouldn’t expect as large a movement as if they were down 21 points like the GOP in 2021, or their -36 in 2009.

Democrats in 2026: Not as bad as it seems?

There are two reasons this matters. First, it reinforces our point last summer that the “worst-ever” framing of the WSJ poll was never really supported by the average of polls: an average of polls never showed a -19 hole. Second, it’s evidence of our other point that the out-party should gain ground in favorability before the midterms, as the party in power accumulates policy shocks and thermostatic public opinion kicks in.

We argued in July that the Democratic brand wasn’t as broken as a single bad poll implied. The historical pattern in our new average adds a complementary point: that party brands are to an extent “self-healing” over the long term and relative to the other party. This presents a fundamental challenge for both parties: even if you’re strictly enacting policies voters support, how can you hope to build a durable long-term coalition?

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Other polling nuggets

• In a new Reuters/Ipsos poll (Apr. 15 - 20), Americans, especially Republicans, expressed concerns about the upcoming midterm election. Forty-six percent of respondents said that there are large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections (in reality, this is not a widespread problem), including 82 percent of Republicans. Moreover, 83 percent of Republicans said they worried about fraudulent mail-in ballots, compared with 33 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Americans overall. And while just 28 percent of Americans supported National Guard presence at the polls, 45 percent of Republicans said they did.
  
  There are some points of agreement between the parties, though. Seventy-nine percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans agreed that their own ballots will be counted properly. And 77 percent of Americans, including 95 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats, support a requirement that voters show some form of ID at the polls.

• For the first time in over 15 years, Democrats have taken the lead over Republicans on who voters trust more to handle the economy in Fox News polling. According to a new Fox/Beacon Research/Shaw and Company Research poll (Apr. 17 - 20, 2026), voters said that Democrats would do a better job on the economy than Republicans by a margin of 4 points. Democrats hold a lead on some other key midterm issues, including healthcare (21 point lead), inflation and prices (8 point lead), and foreign policy (6 point lead). On the other hand, Republicans continue to dominate Democrats on border security (16 point lead), and hold a lead on other important midterm issues, including immigration (8 point lead) and national security (6 point lead).

• Asked about a variety of quality of life issues, voters are overwhelmingly pessimistic in a new Echelon Insights poll (Apr. 17 - 20, 2023). Topping the list: “trust in government and institutions,” which 73 percent said was getting worse and 12 percent said was getting better, a margin of 61 points. Next was “cost of living,” which voters said was getting worse rather than better by a margin of 60 points, “mental health and emotional well-being,” (49 points), and the quality of education and job security, tied at a margin of 40 points. The only issue tested that wasn’t underwater was “workplace safety,” where 31 percent of voters said it was getting better over time, and 31 percent said it was getting worse.

• Who will be the first to reach Mars? According to a new RMG Research/Napolitan News Service poll (Apr. 14 - 15, 2026), it’s nearly a tied race between SpaceX and the U.S. government, with 35 percent of voters saying the government will be first to land a human on the red planet, and 31 percent saying Elon Musk’s company will lead the way. Another seven percent say China will get to Mars first, and 4 percent say some other private company will.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 10:00 AM Eastern on April 24, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +5 (after rounding) over the last week, with 47.4 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall versus 42.4 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating fell to a new all-time low of 36.7 percent this week, while the percent of Americans who disapprove of the job he is doing rose to 59.2 percent. This is the first time his disapproval has risen above 59. Trump’s -22 rating matches his first-term low, which came after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

These averages update fresh on the 50+1 website with every new poll we add to our database.

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In the polling analysis industry, we rightfully spend a lot of time focused on the president’s approval rating as a proxy for general voter sentiment. And there’s good reasons for that: there’s a strong correlation between, for example, presidential approval and midterm elections (among other things). But today, we’re going to look at some of the other types of questions pollsters ask about the president, to try to get a better understanding of how voters view him overall, and whether those views have evolved.

In a survey released this week, YouGov/The Economist (Apr. 10 - 13, 2026) asked respondents whether various words did or did not apply to the president. A selection of these words includes honest, effective, and strong; as well as corrupt, cruel, and dangerous. The word most commonly selected by respondents as applying to President Donald Trump was “dangerous,” which 52 percent of respondents said described Trump, while 16 percent said it did not.

YouGov has asked this before, so we can get a sense of how sentiment may have changed in recent months because of high-profile events (the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela is arguably the starting point for the current foreign policy turmoil, for example). We looked at a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted December 12-15, 2025, before recent foreign entanglements, and there appears to have been significant movement on these traits. For example, in December, the word most commonly selected as describing Donald Trump was not “dangerous,” it was “bold” (this had fallen to third place by the April survey). And Trump has also fallen on other positive traits as well. In fact, on every characteristic tested, Trump has shifted between December and April, generally in the wrong direction.

And perhaps worryingly for the president, while his approval rating overall hasn’t dropped much with Republicans, you do see drops in these characteristics. For example, in December, just 8 percent of Republicans said they thought the word “dangerous” applied to the president. By April, that had doubled to 16 percent. The percentage of Republicans who said they thought the president was “intelligent” dropped from 74 to 67 percent between the two surveys. And the percent of Republicans who said that “effective” describes Trump fell from 80 percent in December to 68 percent in the April poll.

This kind of change is meaningful, because the president’s job approval in our current era of high polarization has become less a signal of presidential performance and more a signal of partisan identity. Most Republicans are not willing to tell a pollster they disapprove of the president unless he does something truly beyond the pale, but they can express their concerns in other ways.

Views of Trump outside of his approval rating appear fairly sour in other polls as well. In an RMG Research/Napolitan News survey (Apr. 13 - 14, 2026), 51 percent of registered voters said that Trump should resign as president, while 42 percent said he should not – more than thought former President Joe Biden should resign in the wake of his disastrous debate performance in 2024. In a Data for Progress poll (Apr. 9 - 14, 2026), 50 percent of respondents said Trump should be removed from office due to his April 7th social media post that stated, in part, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Indeed, it may be the case that the social media posts are driving some of this dimming sentiment. In a series of overnight surveys conducted by YouGov asking about some of Trump’s more inflammatory posts, Trump’s statements are deep underwater. For example, Trump’s post last Sunday attacking the Pope saw an approval rating of 18 percent, with disapproval at 56 percent. The aforementioned statement about annihilating a whole civilization had approval at 23, with 64 percent disapproval. (The pollster has also tested several other social media posts in the last few weeks.)

Generally, Americans seem confused about what Trump is trying to do with his social media. In a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted last week (Apr. 8 - 10, 2026), asked whether Trump’s social media posts are meant to be what he “intends to do at the time” or “negotiating strategies,” 33 percent of Americans said the posts reflected what Trump intends to do, 24 percent said they were negotiating strategies, and 43 percent said they were both.

YouGov/Economist also routinely asks respondents whether they actually like the president. This “likability” score tends to be a bit lower than the president’s overall approval rating, for two reasons: first, it’s perfectly reasonable to support the policies and official actions of a particular politician, while disliking them personally; and second, because the pollster offers a response option of “neither like nor dislike.” Since the pollster began asking the question, the lowest number of Americans that have ever said they like the president personally is 26 percent, which has been achieved only three times: in the wake of January 6, 2021, in January of 2024, and in March of this year. Trump’s lowest net likability (the difference between the number of respondents who say they like and dislike him) reached the second-lowest level in the history of the series in March.

Even as people’s views of the president’s characteristics have dimmed, though, on other aspects of Trump’s temperament and personality, very little has changed. For example, the April YouGov/Economist survey asked about Trump’s cognitive health and age. Forty-eight percent of respondents said that Trump is suffering modest or significant cognitive decline, while 32 percent said he is not suffering any cognitive decline. This is almost exactly the same as numbers the pollster has previously published; in a YouGov poll conducted last September (Sept. 2 - 4, 2025), 48 percent of respondents said that Trump is suffering significant or modest cognitive decline, and 33 percent said he is not suffering any cognitive decline. In the September survey, respondents said by a margin of 10 points that Trump is too old to be president; in April, they said he was too old by a margin of 8 points.

All in all, it seems that views of Trump as a person and his personality traits have suffered as a result of his most recent actions as president. While his approval ratings and opinions about his age are roughly stable, he is eroding significantly elsewhere, where partisans feel more free to express their disapproval.

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Other polling nuggets

• A new Ipsos America 250 survey (Feb. 25 – Mar. 4, 2026) finds Americans still hold tight to foundational ideals even as confidence in the country’s trajectory erodes: 83 percent say believing in freedom, justice, and equality is important to being American, and 88 percent agree there’s an urgent need for greater unity. But 52 percent say the country’s best days are behind us (versus 44 percent who say ahead), and 77 percent say they have serious doubts about the country’s future. Perhaps most strikingly, while 71 percent say it’s important for the U.S. to provide Americans the opportunity to live prosperous and happy lives, just 19 percent say the country is doing that well — a 52-point gap.

• A new Quinnipiac University poll (Apr. 9 – 13, 2026) finds voters expect the war in Iran to drag on, but partisans disagree sharply on how long. Overall, 68 percent of registered voters say the war will last months (36 percent), about a year (13 percent), or longer (19 percent); just 4 percent think days and 20 percent weeks. Republicans are substantially more optimistic, with 38 percent saying days or weeks versus only 12 percent of Democrats, while 45 percent of Democrats expect the war to last a year or longer compared to just 16 percent of Republicans.

• Americans continue to be skeptical about artificial intelligence, according to a YouGov poll conducted this week (Apr. 17, 2026) among 10,658 U.S. adults. Forty-five percent said the effects of AI on society will be somewhat or very negative, while just 32 percent said somewhat or very positive and 15 percent said neither. Trust numbers tell a similar story: 7 percent said they trust AI to provide accurate information a great deal and 34 percent a fair amount, while a combined 50 percent said they trust it not much or not at all.

• A new memo from Third Way and UnidosUS (Impact Research/BSP Research, March 10 - 20, 2026, 1,000 likely voters with an oversample of 850 Hispanic voters) finds President Trump deeply underwater, with favorability at 44 percent favorable to 55 percent unfavorable overall and 34 to 66 percent among Latino voters. On his signature issue, voters overall say Trump and Republicans have “gone too far” on immigration enforcement by 55 to 43 percent; among Latinos, that jumps to 70 to 29 percent. And 59 percent of voters — including 81 percent of Latinos — say ICE needs significant reforms before receiving any additional funding, with 27 percent of voters overall (and 41 percent of Latinos) saying the agency should be abolished altogether.

• A new Pew Research Center analysis (published Apr. 15, 2026, based on the Spring 2025 Global Attitudes Survey of 25 countries) finds Americans stand out among residents of wealthy democracies for their dissatisfaction with their political system. Despite the U.S. having the highest GDP per capita of any country surveyed, 77 percent of Americans say the country’s political system needs major changes or complete reform — comparable to Brazil (87 percent), South Korea (86 percent), and Greece (83 percent), and well above Sweden (29 percent), the Netherlands (31 percent), and Canada (47 percent). The U.S. is also the only country surveyed where more adults rate the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens as bad than good, and just 26 percent of Americans say children today will be better off financially than their parents.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 11:00 AM Eastern on April 17, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +5 (after rounding) over the last week, with 47 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall versus 42 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating rose within the margin of error to 37.9 percent this week, while the percent of Americans who disapprove of the job he is doing also was flat at 58.1 percent. His -20 rating among all adults continues to be a historical low for this point in a president’s term, except for Richard Nixon’s rating during watergate.

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Primary season is officially heated up, so this week, FiftyPlusOne rolled out new polling averages for several competitive primaries taking place across the country this spring and summer. Here is where a selection of four high-profile contests stand as of April 10, 2026.

California Governor (nonpartisan primary)

California’s open gubernatorial race — governor Gavin Newsom is term-limited and can’t run again — is shaping up to be a wide-open contest. Because California uses a nonpartisan blanket primary, the top two finishers advance to November regardless of party, making the math particularly complicated in a crowded field. Given close polling today, it is possible that either Democrats or Republicans get “shut out” — meaning a candidate from that party doesn’t make it to the November general.

As of today, Republican political commentator Steve Hilton leads the pack with 18.2 percent of the vote, followed by Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell at 14.3 percent, Republican Sheriff Chad Bianco at 13.5 percent, Democratic businessman Tom Steyer at 11.7 percent, and former Representative Katie Porter at 10.1 percent. Hilton “leads” by just 4 points over the field — much smaller than the uncertainty we have given the time remaining until the election and imprecision of primary polling.

However, Hilton was recently endorsed by President Donald Trump, so it’s possible that he may consolidate more California Republican voters as time goes on. With five candidates bunched within 8 points of each other, predicting who finishes in the top two is genuinely difficult. Moreover, California certified over 60 candidates for the primary ballot, so there’s still time for someone else to rise to prominence.

Texas Republican Senate Runoff

In the Senate primary runoff between Attorney General Ken Paxton and incumbent Senator John Cornyn, Paxton has opened up a meaningful lead: our average has him at 47.7 percent to Cornyn’s 40.6 percent, a margin of +7. Notably, Paxton started the runoff period polling above 50 percent and has since settled back somewhat, while Cornyn has held relatively steady.

The polls in the first round of this primary underestimated Cornyn by about 7 points, so there is room for him to beat the polls — and Paxton. Polls of the first round also showed Paxton winning more votes from third place and now-eliminated candidate Wesley Hunt, so he should have the better shot to win. But there’s a long way to go until the election in May!

Louisiana Republican Senate Primary

Incumbent Senator Bill Cassidy is running for a third term in Louisiana, but his vote to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial has made him a prime target for the president. Trump and Governor Jeff Landry both endorsed Representative Julia Letlow, who entered the race in January. Louisiana State Treasurer John Fleming, a former congressman and Trump administration official, is also a major contender.

Our average has the primary on May 16 as a genuine three-way race: Cassidy leads narrowly at 26.7 percent, with Letlow just behind at 25.9 percent and Fleming at 22.1 percent — a margin of just 1 point between first and second. The primary is set for May 16, with a runoff on June 27 if no candidate clears a majority. Given the current numbers, a runoff looks likely.

South Carolina Republican Governor Primary

With incumbent Governor Henry McMaster term-limited and ineligible to seek re-election, the race to succeed him has drawn a crowded Republican field. The top four contenders are Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette, Attorney General Alan Wilson, and Representatives Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman, and the race has become, in the words of one person close to the Mace campaign, “first a race for an endorsement, and second, a race for governor” — Trump has yet to weigh in.

Our average as of April 9 has Mace leading narrowly at 20.1 percent, followed by Evette at 17.9 percent, Wilson at 16.9 percent, and Norman at 11.1 percent — a margin of just 2 points between first and second. The race has been volatile since we began tracking it, with the lead changing hands multiple times. The primary is set for June 9, with a runoff on June 23 if no candidate clears a majority.

A note on methodology: you can read about how we build our averages at fiftyplusone.news/methodology. As we’ve noted before, primary polling is noisy, and our averages should not be treated as definitive (or more definitive than the polling in a race warrants). All four averages will be updated as new polls are released.

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Other polling nuggets

• Generally speaking, Americans support the U.S. agreeing to a ceasefire in Iran if the nation reopens the Strait of Hormuz. In a YouGov poll conducted the day after the ceasefire was reached (Apr. 8, 2026), 66 percent approved of such a plan, while just 10 percent disapproved. However, one day later, Americans expressed some skepticism: When asked who the ceasefire actually benefits, 29 percent said the ceasefire benefits Iran more than the U.S., while 14 percent said it benefits the U.S. more. Another 27 percent said it benefits both equally, and the rest were not sure.

• A growing number of voters are skeptical about government spending. In a Fox News poll conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Co. Research (Mar. 20 - 23, 2026), 75 percent of responds said almost all or a great deal of federal government spending is wasteful and inefficient, up from 57 percent at this time last year. And a record 70 percent of respondents told the pollster that their own taxes are too high, the largest percentage to say so since the survey began asking the question in 2004.

• While Artemis II makes her way back to Earth, Americans feel positively about the space program and NASA. In an Ipsos poll (Apr. 3 - 5,2026), 80 percent of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of NASA. In addition, 76 percent said the U.S. space programs makes them feel proud. As to long term goals, 59 percent said they thought it was strategically important for the U.S. to establish a long-term presence on the moon, while 37 percent said it was not that important to U.S. interests. (Newt Gingrich must be so excited.)

• According to a Pew Research survey (Mar. 23 - 29, 2026), Republican support for NATO continues to decline. Asked how much the U.S. benefits from NATO membership, just 38 percent of Republicans said the U.S. benefits a great deal or a fair amount, down from 55 percent in 2021 and the high 40s in 2025. Independents saw a similar decline: 59 percent said the U.S. benefits a great deal or fair amount from NATO membership, down from 71 percent in 2021 and the mid-60s in 2025. Democrats, however, are holding strong: between 81 and 85 percent of Democrats said that NATO membership benefits the U.S. in every survey Pew has conducted between 2021 and today.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 9:00 AM Eastern on April 10, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +5 (after rounding) over the last week, with no significant change in our aggregate. Today 47 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall, versus 42 percent for the Republicans. Around 11 percent of registered voters are undecided.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating rose within the margin of error to 37.6 percent this week, while the percent of Americans who disapprove of the job he is doing fell slightly to 58.1. His -20 to -21 rating is a historical low for this point in a president’s term.

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Donald Trump won the 2024 election in large part on two promises to the American people. First, he wouldn’t get involved in any more foreign wars; candidate Trump charged Democrats with dragging the country into endless quagmires in Ukraine and the Middle East that used up resources that could be spent here at home. And second, he would bring down prices for everyday goods and services such as groceries, electricity, and gasoline.

But despite his promise to lower prices “on Day One,” inflation hasn’t fallen during his first year in office. And in starting a war with Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, President Trump broke the first promise — and he set off a chain of events that would further exacerbate prices, breaking the second. Since the start of the war, the national average price of a gallon of gasoline in America has risen 42%, from $2.90 to $4.13.

Accordingly, Americans’ approval of how Trump is handling prices has fallen to an all-time low. The 50+1 average of issue polls, which indexes every national survey that asks Americans how they think the president is handling certain policies, shows Trump’s rating on prices/inflation falling from -26 at the start of the war (already his worst policy issue overall) to -33 today.

But the bigger drop has come on handling America’s relationship with Iran. After strikes last summer that the administration claimed destroyed Iran’s capability to build a nuclear weapon, Trump’s net approval rating on the issue was -7. That made conflict with Iran one of the president’s strongest issues — better than his approval rating overall, on foreign policy, and even on immigration, his rosiest issue today. And the short-lived military intervention in Venezuela was also viewed more positively than his overall approval and his foreign policy approval. But as the current war has unfolded, voters have turned against him quickly. On March 1, adults were against Trump’s handling of Iran by 13 points. Today, his rating has fallen to -27.

Americans’ net rating of how President Trump is handling foreign policy in general has also sunk since March 1, from -16 to -19.

The war in Iran presents a two-pronged issue for the president. Not only is it a highly visible example of him breaking a key election promise, but rising gas prices also feed directly into voters’ anxieties about the cost-of-living crisis that already constituted Trump’s weakest issue. Voters are experiencing two broken promises at once.

The cost of these broken promises are also visible in Trump’s overall approval rating, which has fallen from -19 to -21 since the start of the conflict. And that’s bad for the president, because it’s much easier to lose a supporter than persuade an opponent. As I wrote last week, Trump’s approval trend basically never improves — once he loses support, he doesn’t win it back.

The political question now is whether either issue resolves in favor of the president. If gas prices stay elevated and the war continues without a clear resolution — or even if it resolves, but the flow of oil remains interrupted — Republicans will face voters at the midterms who feel worse off on the two things Trump promised to fix. But immediate deescalation, for now, looks unlikely: On Tuesday, April 7, Trump threatened Iran by posting on his social media app that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” If the president continues to break his promises, his numbers will continue to slip.

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On Thursday, April 2, 2026, President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, a move that had been rumored to be in the works for some time. Bondi joins former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as the second cabinet-level official to lose their job in Trump’s second term, within the space of less than a month. So this week on The Trendline, we’re taking a look back on how Americans have viewed Bondi, her handling of her job, and the Department of Justice under her leadership.

At the time of her appointment, the public seemed more or less okay with the choice. In a YouGov/The Economist survey taken just as Trump was being inaugurated (Jan. 19 - 21, 2025), 40 percent of respondents said they approved of her nomination, while 32 percent disapproved. Of the 9 cabinet-level appointees asked about in the survey, this net approval of 8 points was the second strongest, beaten only by approval of Marco Rubio as nominee for Secretary of State (48 percent approved, 32 percent disapproved).

This initial support came in the context of a wave of media, in which Bondi promised ahead of her confirmation vote that she would not “politicize” the Justice Department, and that justice would be “administered evenhandedly” through the country. Compared to some of Trump’s other picks, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or Secretary of Homeland Security Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bondi was seen as a more conventional choice: a state attorney general being elevated to the federal level.

Bondi was confirmed on Feb. 2, 2025, and quickly stumbled into her first mistakes. On Feb. 21, 2025, she told Fox News host John Roberts that the Epstein “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” causing months of speculation about what she might mean. Later that month, she released the “Epstein Files Part 1,” largely consisting of material that had previously been made public. By July, the Justice Department had denied Bondi’s claims, releasing a memo saying that there was no evidence Epstein was murdered, or that a “client list” existed.

Bondi did not fare well in the polling after this memo was published. In an AtlasIntel survey at the time (Jul. 13 - 18, 2025), 74 percent of voters said they believed that an authentic client list existed based on Bondy’s February statements, and 54 percent said that the DOJ was engaged in “a cover-up of Trump’s previous relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.” Asked if Bondi should remain Attorney General “after the DOJ’s July 2025 memo contradicted her earlier statements about a Jeffrey Epstein ‘client list’,” 28 percent said they thought she should remain, while 51 percent said she should resign.

And while the scandal of the Epstein investigation has swirled in the background throughout Trump’s second term, it’s hardly the only issue Bondi has had to contend with. Facing pressure from Trump, the Justice Department began several prosecutions and investigations into Trump’s perceived enemies, such as James Comey in September 2025 and Leticia James in October 2025. (Both cases were later dismissed in court.)

These moves also didn’t sit particularly well with the public. In a Marquette Law School poll (Nov. 5 - 12, 2025), 55 percent of respondents said that the Justice Department had “filed unjustified cases against Donald Trump’s political opponents,” while 45 percent said the cases were justified. In the same poll, 58 percent said that cases filed against Trump in 2022-2024 were justified, while 42 percent thought they were unjustified, indicating that the public wasn’t just concerned about cases against political figures, but the Trump Justice Department in particular. And in a survey from YouGov/The Economist (Sept. 26 - 29, 2025), 55 percent of respondents said they thought Trump was “directing the Justice Department to go after his political enemies,” while just 25 percent said they thought he wasn’t.

This sentiment has persisted over time: in a YouGov/The Economist poll taken this month (Mar. 13 - 16, 2026), the same question was asked. In that poll, 56 percent of respondents said they thought Trump was using the Justice Department to go after enemies, while 23 percent disagreed. And the Epstein controversy has continued to swirl, as more files have been released and, controversially, some have not. Voters continue to be skeptical of the administration on the issue. In a University of Massachusetts/YouGov survey taken last week (Mar. 20 - 25, 2026), 59 percent of respondents agreed that the Trump administration is “hiding important information about the Epstein case,” while 18 percent disagreed and 24 percent said they “neither agree nor disagree.”

Throughout each of these scandals, Bondi’s unpopularity has continued to grow. While favorability or approval for cabinet level officials is not asked in every survey, we compiled all the instances where YouGov/The Economist asked respondents about Bondi’s favorability.

While her favorable rating has barely changed over time (it has been between 22 and 27 in every instance), her unfavorable rating has slowing grown, from 24 percent in late January to 48 percent in the most recent survey, conducted March 6 - 9, 2026. And in that survey, Americans also said that they supported Bondi’s firing more than any other Cabinet secretary, both in raw numbers and on net.

In all, Bondi served through a tumultuous time in the DOJ. Americans’ initial support and optimism of her nomination as a potentially more conventional Cabinet member was challenged almost immediately by her handling of the Epstein investigation, and her continued perceived missteps only served to increase her unpopularity. Now, we wait to see who Trump will nominate to try to pick up the pieces.

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Other polling nuggets

• If you think modern smartphones have gotten too big, you are not alone. According to a new Ipsos survey (Mar. 24 - 25, 2026), eight in ten adults say they prefer a smartphone they can operate with one hand, and the same share say it’s essential that their phone fit into a standard pocket without sticking out or feeling bulky. A majority (51 percent) say modern smartphones have become too wide to grip securely and comfortably, and nearly half (49 percent) wish there were more smaller options on the market. Fewer than half (48 percent) say they’d be willing to accept a bigger, heavier device in exchange for more screen space — suggesting that for most people, the tradeoff just isn’t worth it.

• If you could go to the moon — and were guaranteed a safe return — would you? According to a new YouGov survey (Apr. 1, 2026), a slim plurality of Americans say yes: 44 percent said they’d want to make the trip, while 40 percent said they would not (15 percent weren’t sure). Younger Americans were more likely to say they would take the trip, with 53 percent of those under 31 saying they’d go to the moon compared to just 31 percent among seniors. Women also took the less risky approach, saying 50 to 33 percent they would not take the trip, compared to 56 percent of men who said they would.

• A new Washington Post/George Mason University poll of Virginia’s redistricting referendum finds a tight race ahead of the April 21 election. In a poll that has Trump’s approval rating at 40% among registered voters, the referendum is ahead by just 6 points, 53 to 47 percent. The narrow margin may come down to turnout: 85 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independents said they are certain to vote or already have, compared to 77 percent of Democrats. Early voting data has reinforced those concerns, with ballots in Republican-leaning districts outpacing those in Democratic-leaning ones.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 11:00 AM Eastern on April 3, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +5 (after rounding) over the last week, with 47 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall versus 42 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

Another week, another new low in President Trump’s approval rating. He fell to 37.1 percent approval as of Friday morning, a new low for his second term and rivaling his lowest point ever after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. capitol. The percent of Americans who disapprove of the job he is doing also rose from 57.8 to 58.8 percent. The net rating of -21.7 is also a new low.

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On February 14, 2026, the U.S. Senate failed to reach an agreement on funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the federal department that houses agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Coast Guard, and the Transportation Security Administration. This triggered a partial government shutdown affecting only the DHS. Democrats insisted that funding not be provided to ICE until changes are made to the way they enforce immigration laws, and Republicans insisted that the entire department be funded together. (Early Friday morning, March 27, Republicans in the Senate gave in and voted in favor of the Democratic plan to fund all offices in DHS except for ICE. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives.)

In the early days of the shutdown, barely anyone noticed (or cared). In an RMG Research/Napolitan News Service poll (Feb. 23 - 24, 2026) conducted 10 days after the shutdown began, just 57 percent of registered voters knew that there was a partial government shutdown ongoing. And only 4 percent of respondents said that the shutdown had “a lot” of impact on their daily life.

For comparison, that is far less than people knew about the shutdown last fall. In a poll taken at a similar point in the life of the fall shutdown (Oct. 13 - 14, 2025), 74 percent knew there was a government shutdown. During the fall shutdown, voter awareness grew over time: In the RMG Research/Napolitan News Service polling, by early November last year, 85 percent of voters knew there was a shutdown.

But this time around, it’s not clear that voters have tuned in in the same way. In a YouGov/CBS News poll taken last week (Mar. 17 - 20, 2026), just 55 percent said they were following news about the shutdown very or somewhat closely. And a third of respondents said they weren’t sure of the Democrats’ or Republicans’ positions on the issue (in reality, this is probably an underestimate, since some respondents might reflexively defend their “side” rather than admit they don’t know what’s going on).

Even so, in the early days of the current shutdown, it looked like the Democrats had a decent level of support for their position. In a Navigator Research poll (Feb. 19 - 23, 2026), 58 percent of voters said they agreed more that congress should “withhold funding from ICE until it changes its approach, even if that means shutting down the Department of Homeland Security,” while 34 percent agreed that they should “continue to fund ICE in its current form to reopen the Department of Homeland Security.”

However, as TSA agents have gone weeks without a paycheck, Americans are starting to see chaos at the nation’s largest airports. Hundreds of TSA agents have quit, and some airports have reported call-out rates among agents of up to 40 percent. And while Americans may not be paying close attention to the shutdown, they certainly noticed the consequences: in a YouGov poll this week (Mar. 25, 2026), 65 percent of Americans said that security wait times at airports were longer than average or among the longest they’ve ever been. Just 10 percent said they were average or shorter than usual. When asked how much the shutdown had increased wait times, 57 percent said “a great deal,” and another 16 percent said “a moderate amount.”

This increased attention on airports and TSA may have weakened Democrats’ hand on the issue. While the February polling from Navigator Research showed Democrats’ position ahead by 24 points, in a mid-March survey (Mar. 12 - 16, 2026), that support had cooled. Using slightly different question wording than the February survey, the March poll found that 49 percent of registered voters preferred Congress to “withhold all funding from the Department of Homeland Security, including funding for the TSA (Transportation Security Administration), until ICE changes its approach,” while 36 percent preferred Congress to fully fund the department, a margin of just 13 points.

As the chaos increased, several approaches to resolve the situation were proposed. Elon Musk offered to pay TSA agents temporarily. Senators offered a compromise deal that would fund parts of DHS, including TSA, but would not include funding for ICE and some other immigration-related departments. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump rejected both of these proposals, instead sending ICE agents to support the TSA in some airports. According to a Verasight/Strength in Numbers poll (Mar. 24 - 25, 2026), both these moves were underwater: Americans disapproved of deploying ICE to airports by 13 percentage points, and disapproved of Trump rejecting the Senate compromise by 31 percentage points.

Finally, in the wee small hours of Friday morning, the Senate went ahead and passed their compromise funding deal, despite the president saying he didn’t support it. And Trump, perhaps realizing how much stress this was causing to American travelers (63 percent of Americans told YouGov that disruptions and delays at airports are very or somewhat stressful), also found a workaround: on Thursday evening, he declared a national emergency, opening a pathway for him to spend funds on pay for TSA agents without having to wait for Congress to allocate them.

It’s yet to be seen whether these moves will help alleviate the travel stress plaguing Americans. We don’t know how quickly DHS will be able to issue backpay for agents, and with hundreds having already quit their jobs, there may still be disruption at some airports. However, it’s quite possible that if the issues with the TSA are more or less resolved via Trump’s emergency declaration, this shutdown will fade back into the background again. That could lead it to drag on even longer if Trump vetoes the legislative solution Senators have crafted, or the House fails to pass it. The shutdown last fall was 43 days, the longest in American history; today is day 41 of the DHS shutdown, so we could be poised to make history again.

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Other polling nuggets

• Americans’ top foreign policy priority related to the war in Iran is keeping gas prices low, a new poll from the Associated Press and NORC finds (Mar. 19 - 23, 2026). The survey asked U.S. adults how important it was for the U.S. to pursue four goals in foreign policy: preventing gas prices from rising, preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, preventing Iran from threatening Israel, and replacing Iran’s government with one that is “friendlier to U.S. interests.” In total, 67 percent of adults said it was extremely or very important to keep gas prices low, whereas 65 percent said the U.S. needed to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and 39 percent said it was important to protect Israel. Regime change was the least popular goal; just 33 percent of Americans said it was extremely or very important to replace Iran’s government with a more friendly alternative.

• A new Fox News poll (Mar. 20 - 23, 2026) finds half of voters say they are falling behind in daily economic life, and 7-in-10 say neither party has a plan to bring prices down The 46 percent who say they are personally falling behind financially is near the survey’s all-time record — and 61 percent say they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills if they missed more than two paychecks. That’s up from 54 percent in 2023.

• For the first time in Gallup’s post-pandemic tracking, U.S. workers are more likely to say they are personally struggling in their lives (49 percent) versus thriving (46 percent). Just 28 percent of workers say now is a good time to find a quality job in the U.S., down from 70 percent in the middle of 2022. Job satisfaction has dropped across the board, but especially for federal workers: their happiness is down 12 points, double the decline among other workers.

• Americans think artificial intelligence would probably beat them at picking stocks, but are far less confident in AI’s ability to forecast elections. In a YouGov poll (Mar. 25, 2026), 17 percent said they’d beat a chatbot in the stock market, while 29 percent thought the robots would win out. But when it comes to elections, 19 percent thought AI would do better, while 21 percent thought they would beat the chatbots.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 11:00 AM Eastern on March 27, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +5 (after rounding) over the last week, with 47 percent of registered voters saying they’ll cast their ballot for Democrats this fall versus 42 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

Another week, another new low in President Trump’s approval rating. POTUS sagged to 37.9 percent this week, the first time in his second term that his approval percentage started with the number 37. His disapproval rating also rose slightly from 57.2 to 57.8 percent. The net rating of -19.9 is also a new low.

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Last week, Axios reported on a new maternal-health survey commissioned by the organization Heartland Forward. The poll found that “nearly 9 in 10 Americans (88%) view maternal mortality as a serious problem in the United States. Yet fewer than half (43.6%) understand the U.S. has a higher maternal mortality rate than peer nations.”

Axios’ write-up of the survey looks like any other poll release. The bottom of the “poll” release, however, looks like this:

The survey is not a set of interviews with humans, explains Aaru, the company that conducted the “poll,” but instead based on interviews with artificial “agents” — computer programs that simulate humans by inputting demographic and other data into a series of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems, often referred to as “synthetic data.”

This is not an isolated case. In fact, it’s not even the only case this week! Here’s the methodology for a new “poll” that was released by The Public Sentiment Institute from Monday, March 21, 2026:

The business of synthetic data is booming. Aaru has been pitching synthetic political research for some time; Semafor reported in 2024 on the company’s use of AI agents instead of human respondents in election-related work. Meanwhile, Qualtrics announced this month that clients can now combine synthetic and human panels on one platform. And in February, a company called Simile raised $100 million to build AI systems for predicting human behavior.

I think we are going to see a lot more of these AI-generated polls in the future. And since our job here at FiftyPlusOne.news is to aggregate polls to better estimate issue attitudes and voting behavior, we decided we should have a public policy for dealing with them. In short: 50+1 will not be using any “poll” that includes AI-generated “survey respondents” in our work. Here’s why.

First principles: a poll measures opinion by asking people how they feel

We see two big issues in using AI-generated survey results: one based in theory about what polling is for, and one statistical.

When it comes to the purpose of polling, the core issue with AI-generated data is simple: polls are supposed to be a way of talking to people not predictions of what people would say by algorithmic systems, AI-generated or otherwise.

In 2022 I wrote a book about how polls work and why they are important to the democratic process. A “poll” is something that measures public opinion by interviewing people selected to represent a population. That is the basic logic of survey research, and it remains the standard account of how opinion polling works. When George Gallup was developing some of the foundational ideas about political polling, he intended polls to “take the pulse of democracy.” Surveys, from the democratic point of view (note lower-case “d”), are just another way of talking to the voters. The political scientist Sidney Verba used to say that polls do what democracy is supposed to do in its most ideal form, giving everyone an equal chance to participate in the democratic process.

Synthetic systems do something different. They do not measure opinion by asking people what they think. They infer what people would probably say from demographic profiles, training data, prior surveys, text corpora, behavioral signals, or other model inputs. That sounds fancy, but primarily the way this happens is a researcher tells a large language model to act like a person given some set of demographic variables. What would you say in response to X question if you were a white, 30-44 year old man without a college education that lived in Virginia and made between 50,000 and 100,000 dollars per year? What if you were afraid of heights?

To be clear, such simulations are useful for many purposes. They may even produce estimates that are close to observed public opinion on one or many questions. I have written several academic reports on these approaches so I may have a better idea than most people about what’s going on under the hood here, and I think there is potential for some very accurate emulation of human behavior in the future — perhaps even the near future.

But the predictions these simulations spit out are still only model outputs, not direct measurements of how people feel. And that is why we do not consider such predictions to constitute “polls.”

Why that distinction matters for us at 50+1

The second concern we have is that aggregating predictions from outside models could violate the underlying statistical properties of polling aggregation and election forecasting.

See, polling averages are not just piles of numbers. They work because real polls share certain statistical properties, and can be “combined” using statistical methodologies that detect trends in noisy data. The most fundamental property of these models is that each survey is based on a finite set of actual respondents — and so comes with a measurable level of uncertainty to communicate to the model. On top of that, different pollsters make different choices about sampling, fieldwork, weighting, mode, screening, and question wording that can cause additional bias and error. Averaging helps reduce some noise between pollsters because the mistakes are not perfectly shared across firms.

Synthetic outputs, however, do not have the same type of error structure. If no humans were interviewed, there is no respondent-level sampling error in the usual sense. You can generate 500 synthetic respondents or 50,000, but that does not create new information about what the public thinks. It just produces more draws from the same underlying model. Evidence suggests simulated respondents tend to cluster around an answer more than human respondents, creating both high bias and low variance. (This is not something you want in a polling average.)

Just as important, synthetic estimates are likely to be highly correlated with one another — and in some cases with the polling ecosystem more broadly — because they often rely on overlapping sources of information. They may draw on similar priors, similar public text, similar demographic assumptions, similar media signals, and sometimes even prior polls themselves. If synthetic data is based on polls, and polls are based on synthetic data, then we enter a feedback loop where actual public opinion ends up lost.

That means adding synthetic outputs to a polling average would not diversify error in the way that combining independent surveys can. It would risk hard-coding model-based bias into the average. And our models wouldn’t know how much to update underlying trends in opinion given this new data, because they don’t know how much information these new data points contain.

You don’t have to take my word for it. In their 2024 Political Analysis paper, Synthetic Replacements for Human Survey Data? The Perils of Large Language Models, Joshua Clinton and Jennifer Larson find that while ChatGPT can sometimes reproduce broad averages, it is “not reliable for statistical inference”: the responses show too little variation relative to real surveys, and the estimated relationships often differ substantively from those found in the American National Election Study, a large, annual gold-standard survey of American voters.

A newer February 2026 paper, Do LLMs Track Public Opinion?, reaches a similarly skeptical conclusion. Using daily LLM queries benchmarked against high-quality 2024 election-cycle polls, the authors find “systematic directional miscalibration.” In their headline result, every model overpredicted Kamala Harris’s favorability — often by large margins.

Our policy

So our policy is straightforward. FiftyPlusOne will not collect or aggregate synthetic data in our polling averages or election forecasts. If a source does not interview real human beings, it is not a poll for our purposes.

In addition, we will not aggregate predictions generated by AI-augmented approaches, such as Aaru’s and others, and those based purely on statistical models. This policy applies to fully synthetic systems and to hybrid designs that blend a human interviews with model-generated respondents.

We care about what Americans think, because our government is intended to serve the people. Until robots get the franchise, it’ll be all human at 50+1.

Paid subscribers to 50+1 get access to premium analysis, plus sortable tables and complete data access on our polling website. If you want to follow the 2026 cycle with the best data at your fingertips, become a paid subscriber.

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In recent weeks, there have been a spate of new concerns about prediction markets, online betting sites where everyday Americans can gamble on pretty much anything. Concerns have been raised about insiders leveraging private information to make money on topics as diverse as the television show Survivor, the outcome of this year’s Academy Awards, and even possibly government officials betting on the war in Iran.

Amid the handwringing about whether the casino-ification of American life might be bad for society, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes brought criminal charges against Kalshi, one of the major players in the business, and Democratic politicians introduced legislation to ban bets on government actions, including war, and prevent insiders from trading on events where they either know or control the outcome.

So, what do Americans think about these markets? Who’s using them, and what are they using them for? This week on The Trendline, we take a look at what Americans have told pollsters about these new, often risky, financial markets.

Prediction market uptake approaching sports betting sites among young men

According to a poll conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the American Institute for Boys and Men (Feb. 27 - Mar. 1, 2026), most Americans aren’t all that familiar with prediction markets. Just 21 percent said they were very or somewhat familiar with the platforms, another 36 percent said they had heard of them, and 42 percent said they had not heard about them. When it comes to actually using these platforms, just three percent of respondents said they had used Kalshi, one more regulated online option, in the last six months, and 1 percent said they had used Polymarket, another prediction site that lets users wager with cryptocurrency pseudo-anonymously. To put that in context, according to the survey, 6 percent of respondents said they had used DraftKings in the past 6 months.

However, the Ipsos/AIBM poll also included an oversample of Americans under the age of 35. And among younger users, particularly young men, things look a bit different. Among men aged 18-24, 29 percent said they were familiar with prediction markets, and that jumps to 42 percent among men aged 25-34. Another third of young men said they had heard about these markets. And while just 3 percent of the population overall said they had used Kalshi in the past six months, that number more than doubles among young men: 7 percent of men aged 18-24 said they had used the platform, and 8 percent of men aged 25-34 said the same. Asked about a variety of betting-related apps, young men were much more likely than the population overall to say they had used them.

In another survey conducted by Echelon Insights for Paradigm (Feb. 13 - 18, 2026), 17 percent of voters said they had ever placed a bet on a prediction market. As with the Ipsos/AIBM poll, they find that these bettors tend to be younger, with 38 percent of those aged 18-34 saying they had placed a bet, compared to just 3 percent of those aged 65 and up. Moreover, both surveys show that nonwhite Americans are more likely to use prediction markets. For example, in the Echelon Insights/Paradigm poll, 13 percent of white Americans said they had placed a bet, while 25 percent of nonwhite Americans said the same.

As to what users are betting on, the dominant category is sports. Forty-eight percent of those who told Ipsos/AIBM they had used a prediction market in the last six months said they purchase sports contracts. (The sample size of respondents who told Ipsos/AIBM they used prediction markets in the last six months is 96, so treat this paragraph and the following chart with caution.) Following sports, 38 percent said they used the markets for politics contracts, and 36 percent said they used them for contracts related to financial markets.

The fact that sports contracts are so popular on these platforms has caused some consternation with the states. While the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) currently holds authority over prediction markets, maintaining that they sell a narrow financial instrument called an “event” or “futures contract”, the authority to legalize and regulate sports betting resides with the states. Lawmakers in several states have argued that sports contracts on prediction markets amount to an illegal sports book, and a number of states are considering legislation to limit prediction markets’ ability to offer these and other controversial contracts. Others may follow in Arizona’s footsteps and bring lawsuits against the platforms.

Americans say prediction markets are effectively gambling sites

And frankly, it appears that Americans might agree with the states more than the feds in this case. In the Ipsos/AIBM poll, asked if various risky financial moves were more like gambling or investing, a majority (61 percent) of Americans said that event contracts on prediction markets were closer to gambling, while just 8 percent said they were closer to investing and another 18 percent said they were a mix of both. This is closer to what Americans said about more traditional gambling, like slot machines, than other new financial products, like cryptocurrency, and quite different from how respondents saw more traditional risky financial behavior, like retail investors buying individual stocks.

When it comes to legality of these markets, voters are also more skeptical about prediction markets than other forms of gambling. In the Echelon Insights/Paradigm poll, a majority of voters said that the lottery (61 percent) and casinos (57 percent) generally should be legal. And forty-five percent said that sports betting generally should be legal. But for prediction markets, just 35 percent said they should generally be legal.

As to how to regulate these markets, in the Ipsos/AIBM survey, 66 percent of Americans said that “no regulation at all” for prediction markets would be a bad idea, while just six percent said it would be a good idea. Majorities said they would support regulating them “like online/sports gambling (e.g., age 21+, state-level rules)” and “like financial investing/trading (e.g., age 18+, federal-level rules),” so either approach might satisfy the public’s desire to rein in these markets.

Voters are especially skeptical of some of the more controversial markets that have popped up in recent weeks, such as those about the outbreak of war or other classified military operations. In a Data for Progress poll (Mar. 13 - 15, 2026), 59 percent of likely voters said wagers “on potential government actions, ranging from what politicians will say in speeches to whether the U.S. will carry out a military strike” should not be allowed, compared to 28 percent who said they should. And when asked about a variety of contentious contract types, voters were overwhelmingly concerned about people using markets to gamble on political outcomes.

As prediction markets continue to expand into more and more domains of American life, we can expect that lawmakers will start trying to regulate (and tax) these industries. And so far, it looks like Americans will be on their side.

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Other polling nuggets

• The war in Iran is apparently contributing to rising economic pessimism. A new Economist/YouGov poll (Mar. 13–16, 2026) finds 59 percent of Americans say the economy is getting worse — the highest share to say so since October 2022, and up 6 points from the prior week, one of the largest one-week jumps recorded since 2017. The rise is driven mostly by Independents (up 10 points, to 66 percent) and Republicans (up 6 points, to 24 percent). The poll also finds a strong correlation with gas prices: among Americans who say gas prices are up a lot, 76 percent say the economy is getting worse — compared to only 39 percent among those who say gas prices are up a little.

• Trust in federal public health institutions has declined sharply since Trump took office, and the shift is being driven primarily by Democrats, according to the latest Axios/Ipsos American Health Index (Mar. 6–9, 2026). 58 percent of Americans now trust the CDC, up slightly from 54 percent in October, but down from 66 percent in December 2024, with the FDA falling similarly to 53 percent, down from 60 percent in December 2024. On vaccines specifically, 73 percent agree that parents should follow the CDC’s recommended child immunization schedules, down from 81 percent in March, with the share who “strongly agree” falling from 51 percent to 36 percent. Democrats are still twice as likely as Republicans to strongly agree (59 percent vs. 28 percent).

• A new NBC News poll (Feb. 27–Mar. 2, 2026) finds Americans’ views of Israel have almost entirely inverted over the past decade. When asked whether their sympathies lie more with Israelis or Palestinians, 40 percent of registered voters side with Israelis and 39 percent with Palestinians — compared to a 45–13 percent split in favor of Israel in 2013. The shift has been especially dramatic among Democrats: the share viewing Israel positively has fallen from 34 percent in 2023 to 13 percent in 2026, while negative views have spiked from 35 percent to 57 percent. Republicans have moved only slightly, with two-thirds still siding with Israelis. The shift is now actively shaping 2026 Democratic primaries, with candidates navigating pressure from both pro-Israel donors and anti-AIPAC activists.

• Finland has once again topped the World Happiness Report — its ninth consecutive year at No. 1 — while the United States has continued to slide, according to a new Gallup report (published Mar. 18, 2026). The U.S. has declined from 17th to 23rd, a shift driven largely by lower life evaluations among young adults. The Nordic nations continue to dominate the top of the rankings, though Costa Rica entered the top five for the first time — the highest ranking ever for a Latin American country. In the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, youth happiness has fallen by an average of 0.86 points on the 0-to-10 scale, bucking a global trend in which young people in most regions are happier today than 20 years ago.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 11:00 AM Eastern on March 20, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +4.5 over the last week, rounding to 47 percent of the vote for Democrats versus 42 percent for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating hit a new low of 38.2 percent this week. His disapproval rating also held steady from 57.3 percent to 57.2 percent.

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A crosstab tucked into a recent Marist University survey caught the attention of some political commentators: President Donald Trump’s approval rating in the poll among white voters without a college degree is underwater by two percentage points, 46 percent to 48 percent. Among white men without a degree, the survey showed Trump underwater by 3 percentage points, 46 percent to 49 percent, and among white women without a college degree, he was dead even, with 47 percent saying they approved and 47 percent saying they disapproved.

That polling tidbit made its way around social media, with some speculating that the poll indicates that Trump’s support among the white working class — a group he won by nearly 30 points in 2024 — may now be underwater. Others argued that the deterioration of support among white noncollege voters might indicate potential catastrophe for the midterms. Of course, it’s worth acknowledging that “white votes without a degree” is not really the same as “white working class” (whatever that even means), but it is the demographic group for which we at least have some polling data to go on.

So, has Trump really dropped this much among white voters who don’t have a degree? And what does that mean for the midterms? Is the Marist poll an outlier, or part of a bigger trend?

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Breaking down Trump’s approval among noncollege whites

In national polling, Trump’s approval has fallen significantly over the course of his presidency. (Data in this article reflects all polls that were available by 5:00 p.m. Eastern on Mar. 17, 2026.)

When it comes to white voters without a college degree, the polls generally agree with Marist that Trump’s approval has fallen with that demographic as well. But they disagree on Trump’s exact level of support. In our average of polls that break out Trump’s approval rating by demographic group, Trump started his term with nearly a 61 percent approval rating among white voters without a degree, while around 35 percent disapproved; we estimate that today, that approval rating has fallen to around 51 percent, with 47 percent disapproving.

That is certainly a big shift. But when compared to the changes among other groups of voters, the magnitude of the shift among this specific demographic isn’t particularly significant. When we look at shifts in the net approval rating (the difference between the number of respondents who say they approve and the number who say they disapprove of the president), both overall and among white voters with and without a degree, we see parallel movement throughout Trump’s first term.

This sort of uniform change in polling is generally fairly common. It’s far more unusual to see a demographic group moving significantly more than the population overall than following the same pattern, and when that happens, we let you know.

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Noncollege whites still prefer Republicans in the generic ballot

The erosion of Trump’s approval rating among white noncollege voters doesn’t seem to be translating to erosion of support on the generic ballot. Over the course of Trump’s second term, our estimates of support on the generic ballot in November among white college educated voters and white voters without a college degree have barely budged.

From the beginning of our tracking today, Democrats’ margin among white voters with a college degree has increased by less than 3 percentage points, and Republicans’ margin among white voters without a college degree has decreased by less than 3 percentage points. We don’t have enough data to compute an average for white voters by education prior to April 21, 2025, so we aren’t able to see exactly where these groups were at the beginning of Trump’s term. But in our tracking, this movement is fairly similar to what we see on the topline: on April 21, 2025, Democrats were ahead by 2 points in our topline, and are ahead by 5 points today.

Indeed, even in the same Marist poll that showed Trump underwater with white voters without a college degree, Republicans led among the group on the generic ballot. Marist showed Republicans ahead by 17 points with white voters without a degree on the generic ballot, consistent with our estimates. Among white men without a degree, Republicans led by 15 points.

To be sure, there are reasons to be a bit skeptical about the polling among white voters by education. We only have 23 surveys in our dataset that provided crosstabs for this group, which is a fairly small sample size to go on. But if we consider white voters overall, we have 249 surveys, and our estimates for that group show similar movement–white voters have moved about 3 points, on the margin, toward Democrats since April 21, 2025.

And generally speaking, when we break out different demographic groups, we see parallel movements on the generic ballot, suggesting in most cases a fairly uniform swing. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule—particularly when we consider crosstabs by age—but most groups appear to be shifting by about the same amount over time. So that should give us some confidence that the estimate, while based on somewhat thin data, is capturing a realistic snapshot of these demographics.

Regardless of whether white voters without a degree have been moving towards Democrats over the past year, though, analysis from the Pew Research Center suggests that Republicans’ standing with this demographic has been eroding throughout Trump’s time on the national stage. Pew estimates that in 2016, Trump won white voters without a degree by 36 points; by 2020, that margin had shrunk to 32 points, and in 2024, they estimate he won white noncollege voters by 29 points, 64 percent to 35 percent. Trump’s improvement from an 8-point win among all voters without a degree in 2020 to a 14-point win in 2024 appears to be driven entirely by nonwhite voters: Black voters without a degree moved 18 points toward Trump, and Hispanic voters without a degree moved 20 points, per Pew’s estimates.

In some ways, Pew’s numbers jibe with our current polling average: we estimate that around 36 percent of white voters without a degree would vote for a Democrat in November, fairly similar to the 35 percent that Pew estimates Harris won in 2024. It’s the Republican estimate that is dragging down the margin for the GOP here–we estimate that around 54 percent of white noncollege voters would choose a Republican this fall, far less than the 64 percent that voted for Trump in 2024. It may be the case that the roughly 10 percent undecided voters among this demographic will ultimately lean toward Republicans; based on the data we have right now, it’s impossible to say what that group of undecided voters look like.

Here’s the bottom line: Yes, Trump’s approval rating among white voters without a degree has dipped over the last year—but so has his rating among pretty much every demographic group in the country. There is little evidence that this group is moving faster against the president than any other group, and surveys showing Trump underwater with noncollege whites are, for now, outliers. The group is also roughly as GOP-leaning on the House generic ballot as it was at the start of Trump’s presidency — though, even then, polls showed the group moving left compared to where they were in 2024. The data so far suggest the group is not turning on the Republican Party, even if many have soured on the president.

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Methodology

To estimate demographic subgroup trends for presidential approval and generic ballot, we use an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) that adjusts polls for their sample size, recency, subgroup noise, and movement in the Trump’s national approval trend and generic ballot trend since each poll was conducted. The following methodology statement refers to Trump approval polling; the same steps are taken to calculate generic ballot estimates.

We calculate this average in five steps. For any given day, we look at the polls conducted for a subgroup on or before that day, and do the following:

1. First, each poll’s approve and disapprove vote shares are de-trended by subtracting the corresponding national topline estimate on the poll’s end date, isolating each subgroup’s deviation (aka residual) from the national environment on that day. If the national average for Trump’s approval is 45% on the day a poll is released and the subgroup result is 50%, for example, we record the subgroup residual as +5.

2. Second, we calculate a EWMA with a decay rate of 0.96 (roughly a 17-day half-life) on these de-trended residauls from all polls for this subgroup. Then we add back the national topline from whatever day we are running the average to produce trend-adjusted subgroup estimates. This ensures our average accounts both for movement in the national average (which gets polled more often) and a subgroup’s overall lean toward one party.

3. Third, we compute house effects for each pollster in each subgroup based on how much their polls differ from the average. Each firm’s house effect is equal to the average difference between their results and the trendline-adjusted national average on the day the pollster released their results. We then shrink the house effect toward zero to account for noisy residuals, via the formula `adjusted = raw_effect * n / (n + 5)`, where n = the number of polls from a pollster among that subgroup. So a pollster with 1 poll keeps 1/6 (~17%) of their estimated bias. With 5 polls it’s 50%, with 10 polls it’s 67%, etc. This ensures that when we have relatively few results from a given pollster, we aren’t overconfident in their house effects.

4. Fourth, we subtract each pollster’s house effect from their results, and then calculate a new aggregate estimate using poll readings that are adjusted both for house effects and movement in the national generic ballot average. We do this by repeating steps 1 and 2 above, but using the house-effect-adjusted poll results instead of the raw results. That gives us a final EWMA for approve and disapprove shares in the demographic group!

5. The final step is to blend this EWMA with a model-based prior prediction of the average that is used to smooth out phantom swings that can result from noisy data. The modeled prior for each subgroup is simply the national topline plus that group’s average historical residual values — giving us a stable estimate of where the group “should” be on any given day based on the overall national environment (i.e., not one that is not weighted by recency, which can exacerbate noise in the trend).
   
   The amount of weight assigned to the modeled prior vs EWMA depends on the cumulative information provided by the polls for each subgroup: groups with many recent, large-sample polls that consistently agree with each other will be driven almost entirely by the EWMA, while groups with few, small, or noisy polls will lean heavily on the modeled prior. This effective weight also incorporates a reliability score for each subgroup, estimated by comparing the variance of that group’s de-trended poll results to the median variance across all groups. Subgroups whose polls are noisy and inconsistent accumulate effective weight more slowly, keeping them closer to the modeled prior even when poll counts are similar to more stable groups.

The final averages we report for each group is thus equal to a weighted average of the EWMA for that group and the modeled estimate, using the following formulas:

• w = eff_weight / (eff_weight + 20)

• final = w * EWMA + (1 - w) * model_prior

Where eff_weight is the cumulative sum of decayed poll weights (each poll’s sqrt(sample_size) * reliability, decayed by 0.96 per day since the poll was conducted). So at eff_weight = 20, it’s a 50/50 blend. At eff_weight = 60, it’s 75% EWMA. A brand new group with one small poll might have eff_weight around 5, giving ~20% EWMA and ~80% prior.

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Pentagon officials told lawmakers this week that the first week of the ongoing U.S. campaign in Iran has cost over $11 billion, and some estimates show that the war will cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion every day. Americans tell pollsters that the cost of living is the country’s most important problem and they don’t see Trump as focusing on the right issues, so this week on The Trendline we’re checking in on how Americans think about the cost of the war and federal spending more generally.

Across the political spectrum, Americans do express concern about the cost of the new war against Iran. A majority of Republican, Democratic, and Independent adults said they were very or somewhat concerned about the financial costs of U.S. military action in Iran in a Reuters/Ipsos survey published this week (conducted Mar. 6 - 9, 2026). But notably, Republicans are far less concerned than any other group, and the number of Republicans who said they were “very concerned” is 50 percentage points smaller than the number of Democrats who said the same.

Contrast that with, for example, the number of respondents who told the same pollster that they were very or somewhat concerned about “risk to the lives of American military personnel,” where we see agreement across the political spectrum, with at least 85 percent of every group expressing concern, and it appears that funding stands out as a point on which the parties disagree.

And this disagreement may not come as a big surprise. For years, polls have shown differences in how the two parties prioritize federal spending, particularly when it comes to spending on the military and national defense. While Americans across the political spectrum support increased spending on universal social safety net programs, like Social Security and Medicare, they differ sharply on spending on the environment, education, national defense, foreign aid, and ICE, according to new YouGov/The Economist data (Mar. 6 - 9, 2026).

When it comes to national defense in particular, YouGov showed 58 percent of Republicans supported increasing spending, while 6 percent supported decreasing spending. On the other hand, only 20 percent of Democrats supported increased spending on defense, while 38 percent said it should be decreased.

And the parties also differ in terms of what spending they would cut to reduce the federal debt. In a poll conducted by Gallup last year (Sept. 2 - 16, 2025), Democrats’ most favored option for reducing federal debt (other than raising taxes) was cutting defense spending, with 63 percent saying they would support the move. But among Republicans, only 13 percent said they would support cuts to defense spending. In contrast, GOP voters favored cutting Medicaid and food assistance programs (75 percent) and increasing tariffs (89 percent) to decrease the deficit.

It’s expected that in the coming weeks, Congress will consider a supplemental spending bill to fund continued military action in the Middle East. And despite the fact that voters across the political spectrum have been concerned about the rising national debt for years, Republicans appear ready to support it. Democrats, for their part, have not committed to attempting to block the package, so regardless of American’s feelings about defense spending, it may be inevitable that the money gets approved.

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New polling average for Illinois Senate primary

This week, 50+1 launched a polling average for the upcoming Democratic primary for U.S. Senator from Illinois (the seat currently held by retiring Sen. Dick Durbin). According to the polls, the race is most likely to be won by Raja Krishnamoorthi, the current U.S. Rep. from Illinois’ Eight Congressional District; Juliana Stratton, the state’s current Lieutenant Governor; or Robin Kelly, the Rep. from IL-02.

We know it’s a little close to the contest to be launching a polling average (voters cast their ballots next week), but we here at 50+1 are still testing out our infrastructure for more primary averages. We expect Illinois will be our final test, and other averages can come along sooner!

As with the Texas elections last week, primary polling averages should be considered noisy and treated with uncertainty. The average poll for the Republican primary for Texas Senator, for example, was off by 7 points in terms of the final vote margin between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton.

Other polling nuggets

• YouGov conducted an interesting survey experiment testing out the public’s approval of Donald Trump firing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem last week. The experiment asks roughly 550 voters each one of two questions: either (A) “ Do you approve or disapprove of President Trump’s decision to fire Kristi Noem as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security?“ or (B) “Do you approve or disapprove of the decision to fire Kristi Noem as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security?”. YouGov found the question wording mentioning Trump received more support, 60% in favor of versus 11% opposed to the firing, compared to the neutral framing, 53% in favor to 11% opposed. The effect is driven mostly by Republicans, who approve more of Noem’s firing when Trump is mentioned.

• A new national survey by the right-leaning pollster Cygnal finds a majority of Americans (55%) believe AI will have a net negative impact on society, but 67% say it’s still important that the U.S. leads in AI development. Young people (ages 18-29) are the most likely to be pessimistic about AI.

• A new Marist University poll reveals voters are anxious about the security of the 2026 election. Just 66% of voters say they are confident that their state or local government “will run a fair and accurate election this November.” Confidence in election administration has fallen particularly with Democrats, Marist notes: In October of 2024, 88% of Democrats told the pollster they were confident in the upcoming election, compared to 72% now. The poll finds 58% of Americans think voters will be turned away at the polls for being ineligible to vote (the poll did not specify whether this turning away would be correct or incorrect; some Americans are, after all, ineligible to vote).

• The 2026 Academy Awards (Oscars) will be held Sunday, March 15, 2026. YouGov asked voters if they’ll be watching, and who their pick for best picture is. Sinners is a crowd favorite with 19% saying it deserves the award. But the popular choice often loses; the same poll found just 2% of adults think last year’s winner, Anora, should have won.

• A new Data for Progress survey finds a slim majority of likely voters — 52% — believe Trump was “at least partly motivated” to take military action against Iran to distract from the Epstein scandal, compared to 40% who say he was not motivated by it at all.
  
  The headline for this survey, sponsored by the digital news publications Zeteo and Drop Site News, was “Majority of Americans Believe Trump Launched Iran War to Cover Up Epstein Scandal.” We think the headline overstates the finding; the question sets a very low bar for agreement, asking voters whether Trump was “at least partly motivated to take military action against Iran in order to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal” or “not motivated at all” by that goal. “At least partly motivated” means even a respondent who attributes minimal weight to the Epstein angle counts as agreeing with the premise.
  
  We think the more electorally significant finding from this poll comes from a separate question altogether. Voters said they would be less likely to support candidates in 2026 and 2028 who support the war in Iran — by a net of around 20 points across three different electoral scenarios, including congressional races, a 2028 presidential candidate, and members who vote for Trump’s Iran supplemental funding request.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 11:00 AM Eastern on March 6, 2026..

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot at +4.7 over the last week, rounding to 47% of the vote for Democrats versus 42% for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

President Trump’s approval rating (38.6%) declined within the margin of error from 38.7% in the week ending March 13, 2026. His disapproval rating also “fell” from 57.8% to 57.5, taking him just off an all-time-high net disapproval rating (now -19).

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National polling and historical trends

As of 4:00 PM Eastern on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, the FiftyPlusOne generic ballot polling average shows Democrats ahead of Republicans by 4.9 percentage points.

This marks a significant improvement for the Democrats since our tracking began in late January 2025. Then, Republicans were leading in our aggregate by 3.3 percentage points (they won the 2024 U.S. House popular vote by about 2 points). This sort of movement is to be expected; generally speaking, the president’s party tends to lose ground on the generic ballot over time. Between the fall preceding a midterm election and the election itself, the president’s party loses, on average, 3.5 percentage points on the generic ballot (and loses about 6 points if you exclude the 2002 election, for which normal dynamics were disrupted because of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks). If that average were true this year, it suggests that the Democrats should expect to see additional gains between now and November of several points; polling in the fall showed Democrats ahead by around 3 percentage points, so there is still room for further increase.

That said, there are a few exceptions to the rule, so the Democrats shouldn’t be too complacent. As mentioned, a post-9/11 rally around the flag effect buoyed the Republican party to victory in the 2002 midterms, and in 1990, when George H.W. Bush was president, the Democrats had an unusually good midterm cycle, holding an early lead in the polls of 10 points, which fell to “just” 8 in November. So while there’s a lot of time between now and November for either party to pick up ground, usually in this situation, the out-party — Democrats — is the one who does.

To better understand where there might be opportunities or pitfalls for either party, we gathered up all the crosstabs to get a feel for how key demographic groups are leaning at this point in the race. (Note: all data referenced in this article is as of 4:00 PM Eastern on Wednesday, March 11, 2026.)

Age

One of the critical demographic groups that propelled President Donald Trump to victory in 2024 was younger voters. According to the Pew Research Center analysis of voters in the 2024 presidential election, Trump earned 39 percent of the vote among voters aged 18-29, the best performance of his three presidential bids.

According to polling this cycle, the Republicans started off in a decent position with young voters. In late January and early February 2025, crosstabs showed a fairly close race among young voters, with a margin of less than 4 points in either direction.

But young voters quickly moved away from Republicans as Trump’s term unfolded; by the end of March 2025, Democrats led among young voters by around 17 points, a lead that has grown to around 22 points today.

Now, some of the big jumps in the polling among young voters may be driven by a relatively small number of polls in the early days of the race. But we do not see a similar bounce in Democratic vote margin among other age cohorts, for which we have the same number of polls. While all age cohorts considered here have moved toward Democrats on the generic ballot over time, the movement among young voters has been by far the most significant.

Now, we do find that among younger demographics, more voters are likely to say they are undecided in polls — but it’s clear from this data that the improvement for Democrats is not just undecided voters getting off the fence. The Republican share of the vote among young voters has fallen from the low 40s at the beginning of the trend (consistent with Trump’s 2024 performance) to the low 30s today (more in line with the 2020 and 2018 elections). And the number of undecided 18-to-29-year-olds hasn’t meaningfully changed; around 14 percent did not choose a candidate in the early part of the trend, whereas today it’s around 12 percent. So we can be reasonably sure Republicans’ weakened position is not just from voters refusing to tell pollsters how they feel, but them actually changing their minds over the course of Trump’s presidency.1

However, those undecided voters could be hiding a potential upside for Republicans. In the latest Harvard Youth Poll conducted in Fall 2025, 22 percent of 18-29 year old voters that voted for Trump in 2024 were undecided about their midterm vote choice, while just 11 percent of Harris voters said the same. And young people that did not have a college degree (and weren’t pursuing one) were also the most likely group of young voters to say they were undecided: 41 percent of non-college young people said they were undecided, compared to 27 percent of college students and 24 percent of college graduates. According to Pew, Trump won voters without a college degree by 14 points in 2024 — so there may be room for Republicans to improve among younger voters.

Race

When it comes to race, there’s some good news and bad news for both parties.

As with all demographic groups, there has been movement over time towards Democrats among all racial cohorts. And unlike among age cohorts, that movement has been fairly uniform. White, Black, and Hispanic voters, for example, have all shifted 6-7 points towards Democrats, on the margin, since the trend began.2

However, there’s some warning signs for Democrats under the hood. While Black voters have shifted towards Democrats since the trend began, our polling average shows 16 percent of Black voters still plan to vote for the Republican candidate in their local House seat in November. This is fairly similar to the 15 percent of Black voters that Pew estimates voted for Trump in 2024, nearly double his vote share among Black voters in 2020. So even as Democrats are making improvements overall, there may still be some work for them to win back support among this crucial demographic.

On the other hand, Republicans seem to have lost ground compared to 2024 among Hispanic voters.3 Pew estimates that 48 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump in 2024, with him losing the demographic by just 3 percentage points, compared to a loss by 25 percentage points in 2020. But in the latest data, Democrats lead among Hispanic voters by around 16 percentage points. And while 11 percent of Hispanic voters do not indicate they plan to vote for either a Republican or Democrat in November, even if you allocated all those undecided voters to the Republicans (highly unlikely!), the party would still be a point shy of matching Trump’s 2024 performance.

And if you are skeptical of crosstabs as a way to measure movement among demographic groups, elections themselves bear this out. Results of both special and general elections held throughout 2025 and 2026 broadly also suggest Republicans have lost ground with Hispanics relative to Trump’s performance in 2024.

Independents

Among independent voters, we’ve also seen a substantial shift toward Democrats since our generic ballot polling average began. Today, our aggregate of polls shows Democrats winning 42% of independent voters, compared to 28% for Republicans. That compares to 36% for Democrats and 30% for Republicans in January 2025.

However, there’s a significant number of independent voters that do not indicate support for either the Democratic or Republican candidates. Depending on the poll, these voters may be undecided, or may tell pollsters that they don’t plan to vote in November at all. Because few pollsters are currently screening for likely voters, it can be hard to tell how things are really going with the political middle.

To make things even more complicated, different pollsters define “independent” in different ways: some pollsters may push respondents to say whether they lean toward one party or the other, and others may not. How so-called “true” or “pure” independents differ from those that lean toward a party can’t be teased out from the dataset we currently have.

Even given those caveats, it’s hard to see the roughly 14-point lead for Democrats among independents as anything but good news for the party. According to Pew, Trump was dead even with independents in 2024 (their version does not include those that lean toward a party), so that swing probably indicates real movement among these voters.

Geography

When it comes to geography, we see a familiar pattern: urban voters support Democrats, rural voters support Republicans, and suburban voters are somewhere in between.

As with racial demographics, there are some concerning elements for both parties here. First, Republicans are significantly underperforming with rural voters compared to recent elections. As of now, about 38 percent of rural voters plan to vote for a Democrat in November, per our estimates. This is better than any presidential candidate has done with rural voters in at least a decade: according to Pew, Harris earned just 29 percent among rural voters in 2024, and both Biden and Clinton had 34 percent vote share with rural voters. And while improvements among rural voters may not help Democrats that much in the House, where gerrymandering ensures more favorable demographics for both parties in individual races, several potentially competitive Senate seats are in states with significant rural populations, such as Ohio, Iowa, and Texas.

On the other hand, Republicans seem to be holding on to their 2020 and 2024 gains among urban voters. In 2016, Pew estimated that 24 percent of urban voters chose Trump over Clinton, which grew to 32 percent for Trump in 2020 and 33 percent in 2024. In our polling averages today, 36 percent of urban voters plan to vote for the Republican candidate in November. If this holds to November, Democrats could be facing a challenge in key Senate races in states with substantial urban populations, such as Texas.

Overall, the generic ballot polling so far shows Democrats on their way to a decent showing in November. And under the hood, they’ve improved their margins with every demographic group we looked at (even the ones not discussed here) since the beginning of 2025. However, Republicans should be feeling good about retaining some of their recent gains among traditionally Democratic groups, like urban voters and Black voters, which may help offset losses among other demographics.

Democrats are up 5 points overall, per our generic ballot average today. The trend most responsible for this swing (7 points relative to the 2024 election) is the party’s strong showing among political independents (+14 at time of publication). If that holds, the party should win the majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives quite easily. But we just have polls, not a crystal ball — so that “if” is still just that, an “if.”

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Methodology

To estimate demographic subgroup trends for the generic congressional ballot, we use an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) that adjusts polls for their sample size, recency, subgroup noise, and movement in the national generic ballot since each poll was conducted.

We calculate this average in five steps. For any given day, we look at the polls conducted for a subgroup on or before that day, and do the following:

1. First, each poll’s Democratic and Republican vote shares are de-trended by subtracting the corresponding national topline estimate on the poll’s end date, isolating each subgroup’s deviation (aka residual) from the national environment on that day. If the national average for the Democrats is 45% and the subgroup is 50%, for example, we record the subgroup residual as +5.

2. Second, we calculate a EWMA with a decay rate of 0.96 (roughly a 17-day half-life) on the de-trended values from all polls for this subgroup. Then we add back the national topline to produce trend-adjusted subgroup estimates. This ensures our average accounts both for movement in the national trend and a subgroup’s overall lean toward one party.

3. Third, we compute house effects for each pollster in each subgroup based on how much their polls differ from the average. Each firm’s house effect is equal to the average difference between their results and the trendline-adjusted national average on the day the pollster released their results. We then shrink the house effect toward zero to account for noisy residuals, via the formula `adjusted = raw_effect * n / (n + 5)`, where n = the number of polls from a pollster among that subgroup. So a pollster with 1 poll keeps 1/6 (~17%) of their estimated bias. With 5 polls it’s 50%, with 10 polls it’s 67%, etc. This ensures that when we have relatively few results from a given pollster, we aren’t overconfident in their house effects.

4. Fourth, we subtract each pollster’s house effect from their results, and then calculate a new aggregate estimate that adjusts for house effects and movement in the national generic ballot average. We do this by repeating steps 1 and 2 above, but using the house-effect-adjusted poll results instead of the raw results. That gives us a final EWMA for each party in demographic group!

5. The final step is to blend this EWMA with a model-based prior prediction of each party’s average that is used to smooth out phantom swings in the average that result from noisy data. The modeled prior for each subgroup is simply the national topline plus that group’s average historical offset from the national topline — giving us a stable estimate of where the group “should” be on any given day based on the overall national environment.
   
   The amount of weight assigned to the modeled prior vs EWMA depends on the cumulative information provided by the polls for each subgroup: groups with many recent, large-sample polls that consistently agree with each other will be driven almost entirely by the EWMA, while groups with few, small, or noisy polls will lean heavily on the modeled prior. This effective weight also incorporates a reliability score for each subgroup, estimated by comparing the variance of that group’s de-trended poll results to the median variance across all groups. Subgroups whose polls are noisy and inconsistent accumulate effective weight more slowly, keeping them closer to the modeled prior even when poll counts are similar to more stable groups.

The final average we report for each group is thus equal to an average of the EWMA for that group and the modeled estimate, using the following formulas:

• w = eff_weight / (eff_weight + 20)

• final = w * EWMA + (1 - w) * model_prior`

Where eff_weight is the cumulative sum of decayed poll weights (each poll’s sqrt(sample_size) * reliability, decayed by 0.96 per day since the poll was conducted). So at eff_weight = 20, it’s a 50/50 blend. At eff_weight = 60, it’s 75% EWMA. A brand new group with one small poll might have eff_weight around 5, giving ~20% EWMA and ~80% prior.

After averaging for each group, overlapping age ranges (e.g., 18–24, 25–34, 18–44) are collapsed into four standard buckets (18–29, 30–44, 45–64, 65+) using the approximate share of the population in each group. (While they are not shown here, we do the same thing for education subgroups. Several overlapping categories are collapsed into four tiers based on the proportion of the population that is shared between the original and target groups: high school or less, some college, bachelor’s, or postgraduate. A separate binary college/no-college category is separated out from the more detailed education variables. We will dive into education and race-by-education breaks in a future crosstabs deep dive!)

Footnotes

In the last few weeks, dozens of pollsters have asked Americans their opinions about U.S. military intervention in Iran. Many articles have been written summarizing these polls, so we won’t go into detail rehashing all the results here. The topline takeaway is, generally, Americans disapprove of the United States’ attacks on Iran starting Feb. 28, 2026, with approval roughly in the high 30s/low 40s, while disapproval sits roughly in the high 40s/low 50s.

Instead, this week on The Trendline, we’re taking a slightly different approach. We’re focusing on polling among Republicans, conducted both before and after the strikes, to better understand how the different factions in the Republican party view not just the Iran conflict in particular, but America’s use of military force and foreign policy more broadly. Most of this polling is based on crosstabs from nationwide surveys, as narrow polling among Republicans on niche issues like this is hard to come by, but it still paints a picture of a party that, while they may be on the same sides of most issues, are still divided in many ways.

First, consider Gallup’s latest World Affairs survey (Feb. 2 - 16, 2026) on the priorities of Americans when it comes to foreign policy.

Compared to Americans overall, Republicans are less likely to prioritize altruistic foreign policy goals that explicitly help other countries, such as “defending our allies’ security” and “promoting and defending human rights in other countries.” On the other hand, Republicans are more likely than Americans overall to prioritize foreign policy goals that would explicitly benefit the U.S. or its safety, such as “securing adequate supplies of energy for the U.S.” and “preventing future acts of international terrorism.”

In addition, according to Ipsos/Chicago Council on Global Affairs surveys conducted over the last 15 years, Republicans have always been far more concerned about Iran’s nuclear program than other political groups.

In the most recent Ipsos/Chicago Council survey that asked this question (July 2025), the gap between Republicans’ view of the nuclear program as a “critical threat” and the overall public’s view was the widest the poll has ever measured, at 14 points. And in their latest survey (Feb. 27 - Mar. 1, 2026), conducted just after the latest U.S. campaign began, this issue topped the list of concerns among Republicans, with 88 percent saying they were “very or somewhat concerned” about “the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons” (75 percent of the public overall agreed).

Given the high level of concern about Iran’s nuclear program among Republicans, and the general instinct to support actions taken by a president of one’s own party, it may be unsurprising that Republicans are much more supportive of the military action in Iran than other political groups. Indeed, even before the strikes were launched, a YouGov/CBS News poll (Feb. 25 - 27, 2026) found that 84 percent of Republicans said they would favor “the United States taking military action against Iran to try to prevent them from producing nuclear weapons,” while 16 percent opposed. By contrast, among Americans overall, 51 percent said they favored the action and 49 percent were opposed.

But the high support among Republicans may also reflect a tendency for voters to follow the lead of their elected and opinion leaders. After the strikes began, YouGov and CBS News reached back out to the same poll respondents to see how their minds had changed. In a less specific question, respondents were asked if they approved or disapproved of “the U.S. taking military action against Iran.” The public overall had shifted ten points away from supporting the action, with 44 percent approving and 56 percent disapproving. But among Republicans, support for military action had actually increased one point, to 85 percent, with opposition at 15 percent. The write-up of the article mentioned that the “MAGA base”1, in particular, was supportive of the action, but did not provide specific details of how MAGA Republicans and non-MAGA Republicans responded.

Other surveys, however, did provide this breakdown. In a CNN/SSRS survey conducted just after the strikes (Feb. 28 - Mar. 1, 2026), 77 percent of Republicans said they approved of “the U.S. decision to take military action in Iran,” while 23 percent disapproved. But the article noted the following:

MAGA Republicans are 30 points more likely than non-MAGA Republicans to say they strongly approve of the decision to take military action, 34 points likelier to say it will reduce the threat Iran poses to the US and nearly 50 points more likely to say they have a great deal of trust in Trump to make the right decisions about US use of force in Iran.

Now, this may seem counterintuitive to people that equate the MAGA movement with the America First movement, but these two ideas are not quite ideologically aligned. While elites in the party do seem to marry these ideas, a survey from Navigator Research conducted just after the strikes on Iran last summer (June 26 - 30, 2025) shows that is less true among the public at large. The pollsters asked all respondents which of the following two statements they agree with more:

• It’s better for the U.S. when we’re more active and involved in world affairs

• It’s better for the U.S. when we’re less active and involved in world affairs

Respondents that chose the first statement were labeled “interventionist,” and those that chose the second statement were labeled “isolationist.” Among other differences, interventionist Republicans were slightly more likely to identify as MAGA (71 percent) than isolationist Republicans (64 percent). (Interventionist Republicans were also generally much older and more politically engaged than isolationist Republicans.) Among Republicans overall, 50 percent were classified as interventionist, more than among Democrats (48 percent).

Non-MAGA Republicans were also generally far less supportive of Trump than MAGA Republicans. For example, MAGA Republicans were 27 points more likely to say they approved of Trump’s handling of foreign policy than non-MAGA Republicans. On whether Trump made the right decision to “bomb Iran, targeting their nuclear program,” MAGA Republicans were 20 points more likely to say it was the right decision than non-MAGA Republicans. Asked whether the U.S. should continue to use its military in the conflict, 53 percent of Republicans said yes; among MAGA Republicans that number rises to 61 percent. On the other hand, a plurality (46 percent) of non-MAGA Republicans said the U.S. should stop.

And in another Navigator survey, this one conducted just before the most recent military actions in Iran (Feb. 19 - 22, 2026), MAGA Republicans were much more likely to support wars, including regime change wars, than any other political group.

This tendency of MAGA Republicans to prefer interventionist policies is not new or unique to the Iran conflict. In a survey from Angus Reid (Jan. 16 - 20, 2026), respondents were asked whether various actions taken in the first year of the Trump administration made them more pleased or upset. While MAGA Republicans were more pleased than non-MAGA Republicans on every issue tested, the largest gaps were among issues related to unilateral or potentially undemocratic actions by the Trump administration and foreign policy.

In a survey from the same pollster conducted after the strikes (Mar. 2 - 4, 2026), MAGA Republicans were significantly more aggressive than non-MAGA Republicans on the operation. MAGA Republicans, for example, said they would support a U.S. decision to send ground troops to Iran by 49 points, 66 to 17, while non-MAGA Republicans said they would support such a decision by only 2 points, 40 to 38. Asked if the military action in Iran would make the U.S. more or less safe, 76 percent of MAGA Republicans said it would make the country safer, and just 5 percent said it would make the country less safe; among non-MAGA Republicans, just 41 percent thought the conflict would make the country safer, while 21 percent said it would make the country less safe. And MAGA Republicans generally thought the operation would be quicker: 59 percent said they believed the conflict would last up to six months, while just 39 percent of non-MAGA Republicans believed the same.

These polls paint a clear picture: while Republicans are broadly more supportive of military action in Iran than the public at large, the MAGA wing of the party is driving much of that support. MAGA Republicans are more hawkish, more trusting of Trump’s leadership on foreign policy, and more optimistic about the conflict’s outcomes than their non-MAGA counterparts. Far from being the isolationist “America First” bloc they’re often portrayed as, MAGA Republicans consistently emerge in polling as the most interventionist faction in American politics today.

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Other polling nuggets

• A new poll from the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy (Feb. 20 - 23, 2026) finds broad, bipartisan pessimism about the state of the country. Two-thirds of Americans say the country is on the wrong track, and 73% believe the Founding Fathers would not be proud of the country today. The economic mood is particularly sour: 77% disagree with a question asking if their cost of living has decreased, and 63% rate the current economy as fairly or very bad. The pessimism is especially acute among young people, with just 12%of 18- to 29-year-olds saying they are “extremely proud” to be American, compared to 41% among those 65 and older.

• With the 2026 Winter Olympics just concluded, a new YouGov survey (Feb. 27 - Mar. 2, 2026) finds that Americans broadly like their national sports teams. The U.S. women’s ice hockey team tops the list, with 56% of adults saying they view the team favorably, followed closely by the men’s ice hockey team (54%), the men’s basketball team (53%), women’s basketball (50%), men’s soccer (50%), and the women’s soccer team (48%). Notably, these teams are popular across party lines — the U.S. men’s hockey team, for example, is viewed favorably by 68% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats — making Olympic sports one of the few things Americans can still agree on.

• Interest in weight-loss drugs continues to grow. According to a new Leger survey (Feb. 6 - 9, 2026), 11% of U.S. adults report currently taking a prescription GLP-1 medication like Ozempic or Wegovy, and another 12% of non-users say they’re interested in taking one. Weight loss is the top motivator, cited by 71% of those considering the drugs. Users also report notable lifestyle changes: fewer cravings, smaller restaurant portions, and shifts in spending away from indulgent categories and toward fitness and personal care.

• Trump’s brief improvement among Hispanic voters appears to be fading. According to a new PRRI survey (Feb. 10 - 18, 2026), just 24% of Hispanic Americans now hold a favorable view of the president, down from a high of 39% in September 2024. The decline has been especially sharp among Hispanic Protestants, who dropped from 48% favorability in September 2025 to 37% in February 2026. Overall, just 36% of Americans view Trump favorably, down from 41% in September 2025.

• Support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement has hit a(nother) new high. According to the latest Economist/YouGov poll (Feb. 27 - Mar. 2, 2026), half of Americans (50%) now support abolishing ICE — the first time the figure has reached the majority threshold in YouGov’s polling. At the same time, opposition has fallen to an all-time low of 39%. For the first time, a majority of independents (52%) back abolishing the agency, and even among Republicans, support has reached a new high of 23%. The shift has coincided with declining trust in ICE overall: 44% of Americans now say they have no confidence in the agency at all, up from 38% in October, and a majority (58%) say ICE uses excessive force.

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Polling averages update

All numbers are as of 11:00 AM Eastern on March 6, 2026.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot steady over the last week, at about 47% of the vote versus 42% for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

After briefly hitting a new net low of -20 in 50+1’s aggregate, Donald Trump’s approval rating reverted back to previous levels somewhat and ends the week at 39% approve and 58% disapprove, among all U.S. adults.

Paid subscribers to 50+1 get access to premium analysis, plus sortable tables and complete data access on our polling website. If you want to follow the 2026 cycle with the best data at your fingertips, become a paid subscriber.

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Footnotes

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By all accounts Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s current lieutenant governor, shouldn’t be winning the state’s Democratic primary for this year’s U.S. Senate race. She’s being outraised by a ratio of more than two-to-one. Her main opponent, Rep. Angie Craig, is a well-known House member with a proven track record of winning tough races. And perhaps most importantly, lieutenant governors have an abysmal track record when running for Senate.

A year ago only half of Minnesotans knew who Flanagan was. Yet according to FiftyPlusOne’s collection of polls, Flanagan leads in every single survey pollsters have published in the race so far. Even polls that have been conducted by Flanagan’s opponent have the statewide number two ahead. Our analysis suggests Flanagan is currently defying historical gravity due to a mix of support from statewide leaders and a strong personal brand. A win is not a foregone conclusion, but she has a strong chance of bucking the historical trend.

Lieutenant governors usually lose races for higher office

Flanagan is trying to pull off a feat that is quite rare in recent political history. Since 2010, 10 lieutenant governors have run for Senate without first being appointed to the office. Only one of those succeeded: Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. And it’s not just the Senate; lieutenant governors have a pretty lousy success rate running for any office. Since 2010, 74 lieutenant governors have run for statewide or federal office, but they’ve won just 36 percent of their races. And that number is perhaps even optimistic for Flanagan, since it includes lieutenant governors who were initially appointed to their seat or who ascended to become governor and then later ran for a full term. These candidates have a leg up on their colleagues, since they can run as an incumbent (although without the full benefits that typical incumbency offers). When these “ascenders” are excluded, the success rate drops to an even lousier 28 percent.

The biggest problem for lieutenant governors might be the job itself. With few exceptions, they just don’t do much. In most states the lieutenant governor is weaker than the governor and lacks a specific domain through which to channel power — secretaries of state, for example, handle elections and business filings; attorneys general get all of the law. The second-in-command usually handles little more than chairing various blue-ribbon commissions or presiding over their state’s Senate (if they even bother to show up, that is). As a result, there aren’t many opportunities to make headlines or raise their profiles in a substantive way that could help them fundraise or win a primary.

That makes for a pretty hefty tide to swim against when running for another office. But Flanagan is staying afloat with ease so far, performing much better than history and the fundamentals would otherwise suggest. What explains her overperformance?

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Flanagan has the advantage on local matters

To start with, Flanagan has managed to cultivate more support from local Minnesota politicians than Craig, whose prominent endorsements have largely come from out-of-state officials. Flanagan has the backing of the outgoing senator she’s running to replace, Tina Smith, as well as the state attorney general, state auditor, plus 46 current state legislators. Craig, meanwhile, has endorsements from just 18 sitting state legislators and none from any statewide officeholders.

Flanagan’s high level of support from local politicians looks to have boosted her profile in the state, and given her access to a broader and more lucrative fundraising network, though she still trails Craig by a significant amount. At the end of last year, Craig had raised almost $7 million, and ended 2025 with almost $4 million cash on hand. Comparatively, Flanagan had raised just over $3 million, and had about $800,000 cash on hand. But the momentum behind those donations is key. Craig’s quarterly hauls stayed relatively flat throughout the year, while a string of key endorsements last spring boosted Flanagan to more than double her fundraising haul from the first quarter of 20251, and kept up that pace through the rest of the year.

Flanagan also boasts an impressively popular reputation. In the three public polls of the race that have asked whether voters view the candidates favorably or unfavorably, Flanagan had an average favorable rating of 72 percent among Democratic primary voters. Craig, on the other hand, was viewed favorably by an average of 64 percent of Democratic primary voters in the state. That’s still a respectable level of support, but not the kind of numbers you’d hope to be getting from your own party’s voters as a four-term congresswoman — and one who has already spent over $3 million on the race.

Craig has also stumbled on immigration, which polls show is tied with the cost of living as the top issue in the state today. At the beginning of Trump’s second term, Craig voted for the Laken Riley Act, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain unauthorized immigrants who have been accused of certain nonviolent crimes. She also voted for a resolution that expressed “gratitude” to ICE agents, though it also included language that condemned an antisemitic terrorist attack in Colorado.

At the time, some observers thought these votes were politically savvy moves that would counter Republican attacks on Democratic immigration policy made during the 2024 election. But after ICE agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, her vote for any Trump-supported immigration measure became an instant liability among Democratic voters, who were flatly opposed to ICE’s actions in Minneapolis and across the country. In a PPP poll for the Flanagan campaign (conducted Jan. 16 - 17, 2026), around two thirds of primary voters said that Craig’s votes for those bills made them less likely to support her.

Craig has said that she regrets voting for the Laken Riley Act, and introduced articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem following the killing of Renée Good by ICE agents in January. But that hasn’t stopped Flanagan from hammering her on the issue across social media. And in a sign of just how potent immigration enforcement has become in the race, the first thing Sen. Tina Smith mentioned in her video endorsing Flanagan as her successor was ICE’s operations in Minnesota.

Another reason Craig may be struggling to gain traction is that she’s marketing herself as a moderate Democrat, and has drawn little coverage from high-profile endorsers. While Flanagan has rolled out endorsements from progressives like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Craig has emphasized her bipartisan credentials and experience working across the aisle. Yet polling shows that Democrats are looking for their party leaders to fight harder against Republicans. While that’s not an explicitly ideological demand, appeals to bipartisanship and compromise don’t often read as strength. Craig has pivoted recently and wrapped much of her campaign messaging in “fighter” language, but it may be too little too late.

Flanagan certainly isn’t without her own political baggage, though. Last fall, allegations of fraud in the state’s social services system led to Gov. Tim Walz suspending his reelection bid and plenty of criticism by association for Flanagan. She has tried to slough off responsibility and lay the blame at Walz’s feet, but is still facing attacks from the Craig campaign for failing to own up to the fraud that happened partly under her watch.

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Win rates vary drastically across cycles

It is possible that 2026 could end up being a better year overall for the nation’s lieutenant governors. Our historical analysis reveals that success rates for lieutenant governors running for other offices have not been constant from cycle to cycle. In fact, win rates rose almost constantly through the 2010s, such that in 2020 and 2022, over half of lieutenant governors running for another office won their races.

But that success rate plummeted in 2024, when only one of six lieutenant governors won their race (now-Gov. Mike Kehoe of Missouri). All that proves is that success comes and goes from cycle to cycle, sometimes in dramatic fashion. And that could mean that 2026 turns out to be a lucky year for the 16 lieutenant governors running for statewide or federal office, including Flanagan.

So far, though, Flanagan seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Up until this point in the cycle, lieutenant governors have struggled to break through in various races across the country. In most polls of Illinois’ Democratic primary for their open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Julianna Stratton is trailing Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi. In New York, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado just dropped his bid for governor amid faltering support. Low polling numbers in Michigan and California have pushed lieutenant governors to switch from running for governor to less crowded races for other statewide office. And just last fall, then-Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears lost her bid for governor in a landslide to Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

Finally, in Wisconsin and Georgia, lieutenant governors could end up having exactly a 50% success rate this year. That’s because each contest features a matchup between two lieutenant governors. In Wisconsin, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes are facing off in the Democratic primary for governor. And in Georgia, Republican Lt. Gov Burt Jones and Democratic former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan are vying to win their respective party primaries for governor as well. That means at least two of the four will end up losing, depending on who makes it through their primary.

So when the dust settles on the 2026 midterms, it’s possible Flanagan ends up being one of the few rarified lieutenant governors to defy history, particularly when it comes to the Senate. We’re still months away from the August primary, more than enough time for Craig’s strong fundraising to turn the tide. But for now, Flanagan is defying the odds and crossing her fingers that 2026 turns out just a little bit better than usual for the nation’s second-in-commands.

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Footnotes

In the State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Donald Trump made exactly one reference to polls. When discussing the SAVE America Act currently before Congress, Trump said the following:

I’m asking you to approve the SAVE America Act, to stop illegal aliens and others who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections, the cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant. It’s very simple. All voters must show voter ID. All voters must show proof of citizenship in order to vote. And no more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military or travel. None. And this should be an easy one and, by the way, is polling at 89%, including Democrats, 89%.

So, is it polling at 89 percent? This week on The Trendline, we check in on how Americans are thinking about voting, democracy, and what parts of the proposed legislation they do and don’t support.

Voters are split on how our democratic experiment is going. In a Bowling Green State University/YouGov poll (Feb. 13 - 16, 2026), voters were asked “thinking about the future, how confident are you in American democracy?” Fifty-one percent said they were “very” or “somewhat confident,” while 50 percent said they were “not very confident” or “not confident at all” (rounding causes the numbers to exceed 100 percent). However, on this point, Democrats were more likely to express concern than other political groups: 36 percent of Democrats said they were very or somewhat confident, compared to 40 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans.

When it comes to the immediate future, though, voters seem to be feeling a bit better. In an Echelon Insights survey (Feb. 19 - 23, 2026), 63 percent of voters said they were very or somewhat confident that “the 2026 midterm election will be free and fair,” a position shared by majorities across the political spectrum: 69 percent of Republicans, 62 percent of independents, and 56 percent of Democrats agreed. However, in the same poll, partisans don’t really trust each other when it comes to elections. 66 percent of Republican voters said they thought that “Democrats are attempting to steal the 2026 midterm election,” while 77 percent of Democratic voters said the same of Republicans.

And while Trump cites concern about noncitizens casting votes in federal elections, that concern isn’t universal. A study from the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections (Dec. 19, 2025 - Jan. 12, 2026) found that while trust that votes will be counted accurately has fallen, particularly among Democrats, the sources of that mistrust vary widely. Among Republicans, 51 percent said they had some or a lot of distrust about “people who are not U.S. citizens” casting ballots in elections, but only 11 percent of Democrats did. For Democrats, the greatest source of mistrust wasn’t about ineligible voters casting ballots or improper vote counting, but gerrymandering. Fifty-one percent of Democrats said that they had some or a lot of mistrust due to district lines not being “drawn in a way that fairly reflects what voters want.”

Now, on to proposed reforms. While the president mentioned a number of different reforms in his address, the SAVE America Act does not include all of those items. The key provision of the SAVE Act is to require states to “obtain documentary proof of U.S. citizenship and identity – in person – when registering an individual to vote in a Federal election.” In a Yahoo/YouGov poll (Feb. 9 - 12, 2026), Americans did support the requirement, but not as strongly as the president suggested. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they favor “requiring proof of citizenship – usually in the form of a passport or birth certificate – in order to register to vote,” while 23 percent said they would oppose the requirement. In the Echelon Insights poll, 67 percent of likely voters said that “requiring proof of citizenship to vote” would make the 2026 midterm election more fair, while 24 percent thought it would make it less fair.

And while Trump claimed bipartisan support for the proposal, according to the Yahoo/YouGov poll, that’s just not true. Democrats opposed the policy by 6 percentage points, 45-39, while Republicans supported it by 85 percentage points, 89-4. Independents also expressed support, but far less strongly; they favored the measure by 37 percentage points, 60-23.

Trump also mentioned other voting-related policies, such as limiting vote-by-mail. On this point, Americans don’t seem to agree with the president. In the Yahoo/YouGov poll, 46 percent of respondents opposed making it harder to vote by mail, while 38 percent were in favor. And even fewer supported making it harder to vote early in person: just 21 percent favor the policy, while 57 percent were opposed. In the Echelon Insights survey, 69 percent of likely voters said that “promoting early voting and secure mail-in ballots” would make the midterms more fair, while 20 percent said it would make them less fair – the opposite of what Trump is suggesting.

The most popular voting-related policy Trump mentioned was requiring voters to present identification in order to vote. In the Echelon Insights poll, this policy was the most favorable of all the policies they tested, with 76 percent of likely voters saying requiring ID to vote would make the 2026 midterms more fair, and just 17 percent saying it would make them less fair.

Finally, while it didn’t make it into Trump’s speech on Tuesday, there’s been ongoing chatter, including from the president, about whether the federal government should take over election administration, either nationally or in certain states. Voters oppose this policy strongly: in an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll (Feb. 12 - 17, 2026), registered voters opposed the policy more than 2-to-1, with 56 percent opposed and 25 percent in favor. Among both Democrats and independents, support was in the single digits, at 4 and 6 percent, respectively. Among Republicans, however, 46 percent supported the idea, with 24 percent opposed. This may be related to question wording, though, as the poll explicitly mentioned that Trump proposed the plan. With Trump’s name included in the question wording, Republicans may be more likely to indicate support than they would without that prompt.

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Other polling nuggets

• According to a new poll conducted by CNN/SSRS after Trump’s State of the Union address this week, just over half (54%) of people who watched the president speak said he was focusing on the right issues. That would be good news for the president, who, polls have shown, voters think is not prioritizing the issues that matter most to them, were it not for the fact that CNN also found this group of speech-watchers leaned politically to the right by 13 percentage points. (The sample size of Democrats in the survey was so small that the pollster was unable to report crosstab findings among them.) Among that already-friendly crowd, nearly half (45%) said Trump focused too little on the economy and cost of living, and just 31% expressed a lot of confidence in him to make living costs more affordable.
  
  CNN’s survey also found that speech-watchers were about evenly split on whether the president’s handling of tariffs was appropriate or an overstep of his powers. State of the Union addresses almost always get watched disproportionately by Americans who already approve of the president — in CNN’s polling dating back to the Clinton era, audience reactions have always been positive — but even grading on that curve, Trump’s 64% positive rating was lower than for the address he gave Congress last year, or Biden’s in his last year in office.

• A new survey from the Pew Research Center (Jan. 20 - 26, 2026) finds a 50-point partisan gap in who thinks their side is winning in politics — one of the widest Pew has recorded in a decade of asking the question. Six in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now say their side is winning more often than losing, while just 10% of Democrats say their side is winning — the lowest mark for either party since Pew first asked in 2016. Notably, even during Joe Biden’s presidency, Democrats were more likely to say their side usually loses in politics than to say they were winning.

• A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll (Feb. 12 - 17, 2026) finds that while about nine in 10 voters who strongly disapprove of Trump say they’d vote for the Democratic candidate in the midterms, among those who only somewhat disapprove of Trump, 46% say they’d actually vote for the Republican candidate, compared to just 32% who’d go Democratic. This is a notable finding, as it suggests 2026 and 2028 could come down to whether Democrats can convert soft Trump disapprovers into actual Democratic voters. Disapproval of the president is a necessary, not sufficient, condition for the other party to win. However, just 10 percent of voters in the survey said they disapprove somewhat of Trump’s handling of his job (48 percent disapprove strongly). That’s a small sample size, so there’s a fairly large margin of error on this result.

• How do Americans feel about war with Iran? The latest Economist/YouGov poll (Feb. 20 - 23, 2026) finds that about half (49%) of Americans oppose the U.S. using military force to attack Iran, while just 27% support it. A majority of Republicans (58%) back such an attack, but majorities of Democrats (76%) and independents (54%) are against it, and even the 58% support among the GOP is lower than at the start of past U.S. military interventions. And yet, 58% of Americans think the U.S. military is likely to take action against Iran in the next month. These numbers suggest any military action would carry significant political risk for the administration heading into the midterms.

• Finally, from Echelon Insights’ February poll: voters apparently think vaping is bad but marijuana is good. The survey found that voters hold strongly negative views of e-cigarettes and vaping while being broadly supportive of marijuana legalization. Support for marijuana legalization now routinely clears 60% in national polls (Pew recently pegged it at 87% when you include medical-only supporters), while public attitudes toward vaping have soured amid youth health concerns.

Polling averages update

Texas Republican U.S. Senate primary

New polls released this week have pushed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton up to a 5.3-point lead over incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn in the GOP primary for the Lone Star state’s Senate seat. Wesley Hunt trails both candidates, at 19% of the vote. Polls can be wildly off in primary contests, so it’s not impossible that Paxton could win 50% of the vote on Mar. 3 and avoid a primary — but it remains unlikely.

Texas Democratic U.S. Senate primary

On the Democratic side of the race, Texas state House Rep. James Talarico has recently pulled into a small lead against U.S. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, with 46.6% of the vote in our polling average vs Crockett’s 43.1%. That lead is within the margin of error and either candidate could win. We calculated that historical statewide primary polls picked the wrong winner in competitive races about 20% of the time.

2026 U.S. House generic ballot

Democrats have held their lead on the 2026 U.S. House generic ballot steady over the last week, at about 47% of the vote versus 42% for the Republicans.

Trump’s job approval

Donald Trump’s job disapproval hit a new high of 58.1% this week, while 38.9% disapprove of him. As of 12:00 PM on Feb. 27.

The poll, conducted by a firm called “Political Intelligence,” is not the first that the firm has done for Herrera. The first survey I noticed was conducted in December, and reported on February 13th by the Daily Caller. The second survey, which gained more attention, was reported by the New York Post on the 23rd. From there, it spread: it was retweeted by a reporter for the Texas Tribune, and further spread by news outlets like Axios and Politico.

Now, that’s all normal for normal poll coverage. But here’s the problem. I’ve spent two weeks trying to find out who conducts polls for “Political Intelligence.” I still have no idea, and the Herrera campaign hasn’t responded to my emails. I can’t email the company because I can’t find any information about them at all.

This is an issue for us here at 50+1 because we adhere to a strict set of methodological standards before aggregating polls from new polling firms. Part of that process is verifying the data came from a real pollster, was generated in a statistically sound way, and the pollster meets some minimal standards for disclosure like telling us who paid for the poll and the basic methodology by which it was conducted.

But in this case, we have been unable to find any of that information for “Political Intelligence”; the name of the firm is manifestly un-googleable (which isn’t actually all that uncommon in the shadier side of the polling universe). We don’t have any leads on who might be behind these surveys.

We’re all about transparency here at 50+1, and I felt this was a good opportunity to peel back the curtain on some of our research methodology. So without further ado, come on a journey with me as we try (and fail) to hunt down that which wishes to remain hidden.

The Hunt

Upon the release of the first poll on the 13th, I began a series of steps I would usually take when vetting a new pollster.

First, I reached out to my network of fellow poll hunters to see if any of them had any information. No dice.

Next, I tried googling, of course. But, dear reader, googling the phrase “political intelligence” yields all kinds of results, very few of which are useful. Go ahead, give it a try. After refining my search in various ways, I finally discovered a campaign firm called “Political Intelligence,” and thought I hit paydirt. But after reviewing their website, one thing seemed odd: this is a Canadian firm. Why would they be polling a Republican congressional primary in Texas?

However, this jogged something in my memory. Back in 2024, when I was working at FiveThirtyEight, I traced exactly these steps. I have seen Political Intelligence before, though the exact context is lost to wherever the archives of old FiveThirtyEight Slack messages are kept. I even recall reaching out to the Canadian firm to ask them if they conducted the poll, which they denied. I was unable to verify details about the company then, just as now. (For added security, I confirmed these details with a former coworker who also remembered that saga.)

Finally, in a last-ditch effort to get any information, I went through the Herrera campaign’s financial filings at the FEC website, to see if I could find any payments to Political Intelligence. Payments could include more information about the firm, like a physical address. But alas, it appears that many of the campaign expenses are going through a consulting firm, which is likely the entity hiring the pollster, rather than the funds being spent by the campaign account directly. This ensures that expenses remain opaque; the consulting firm is not required to submit filings to the FEC.

Look what you made us do

And that’s where I landed on the 13th. I decided at that time to just put it away as a mystery I may never solve, because the details I had from the Daily Caller article at the time were a bit thin, the poll was already two months old, and I wasn’t very optimistic about hearing back from the campaign: If a pollster is this hidden, it’s unlikely I’ll get any additional information.

Then came the 23rd, when the second survey surfaced in the New York Post. This one had a little more detail: attached to the report was a topline document. The new information here: a logo, which I promptly put through a reverse image search. I was hoping to turn up a website, but no such luck. All I revealed was a very short tweet referring to another survey conducted by the firm, with even less information than the other reports. But as to anything else, like a website or names of principal investigators, I seemed to be running out of moves.

Now, here is the dilemma. It is stated very clearly in the FiftyPlusOne methodology that per our ethical standards, “pollsters will disclose the names of their principals publicly.” That is to say, we are not in the habit of publishing surveys from completely anonymous organizations. There are rare exceptions to this rule (pollsters may have good reasons to ask me to keep their names off the record, and I may honor those from time to time), but on the whole, it’s important to us that the firms that we aggregate are on the up-and-up, and if we don’t know who is running them, we can’t vouch for that. However, given that this company appears to have been hired, routinely, by multiple campaigns, I do believe that this is a real polling firm conducting real polls that actually do ask questions to respondents and report their answers.

I wrestled with the question of whether or not to aggregate the polls. Other polling aggregators, who either know something I don’t know or perhaps have looser standards, have done so. (To my knowledge, we are the only aggregator that has a public set of standards for which polls we include, so I don’t know what methodology others are following.) Given the wider media distribution of the second survey, users of our site might be surprised or confused not to see it appear, and I do believe the surveys were conducted according to standard polling practices. On the other hand, it is explicitly prohibited by our stated methodology to aggregate data if we do not know who is behind it.

Ultimately, unless I hear back from the campaign, I have decided not to aggregate the polls. I feel badly about it, but I also feel that if standards exist, they should be followed. I trust our readers enough to understand why I made that decision, and hopefully this little missive helps you to trust us, too.

And finally, poll lovers, if you know anything about Political Intelligence, get in touch!


Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Brandon Herrera as Brendan Herrera. The article has been updated with the correct spelling.