By the Numbers
Real Clear Politics has made its name by aggregating various polls to create an average, sort of a “poll of polls,” on various issues.
Their end-of-2025 report in a few key areas is of interest.
RCP notes that President Trump ended the year with an approval rating of 43.4%, down some 7 points from the beginning of the year. But when Trump 2.0 is compared with the first year of Trump 1.0, he’s more popular now by about 4 points.
They note that in historical terms, Trump fared just as well in this term as his predecessors did in the first years of their second terms…in fact, Trump’s approval rating from mid-July to the end of 2025 was better than both Barack Obama’s and George W. Bush’s nearly the entire time.
At the beginning of 2025, only 26.7% of Americans said the country was headed in the right direction, versus 61.9% saying we were on the wrong track…that’s a so-called “net negative” spread of 35.2%. By the end of 2025, that had been cut in half, with 37.5% saying the country was headed in the right direction, and the now lower 55.6% saying on the wrong track.
Congress was not well thought of when the year started…and that did not change, within statistical margins of error. Barely 22% approval of the job Congress is doing, with 68%–more than two-thirds—disapproving of the U.S. House and Senate.
But there is clearly unrest with the GOP majority in Congress…when asked generically, with no names, if a voter was more likely to choose a Democrat or a Republican for Congress, the GOP is losing ground. It began the year, fresh from the 2024 election and a majority in both chambers, having a 1.5% lead over Democrats in the generic ballot…now, a major shift with Democrats holding a 3.9% advantage—a swing of five and a half percentage points in just calendar year 2025. That’s bad, to be sure…but after the first year of President Trump’s first term, the Democrats held a much wider lead in the Congressional generic ballot, 12.9%. So while the trend is not good for Republicans, it’s better than at this point in 2018.
Now this is an aggregate of polls, and polls have notoriously understated Mr. Trump’s support. But again, his name is not on the 2026 ballot, and all of this bears watching as this key election year begins.
