Latest poll is good news for Trump and awful for Democrats. The president has a 52% job rating. His plans to end government waste and deport criminal illegal aliens are both popular.
President Donald Trump is off to a good start in his second term, according to the latest Harvard CAPS / Harris poll, and his indefatigable nature is gradually winning over the public, while the Democratic Party and the legacy of former President Joe Biden are in free fall.
Trump’s overall job rating is at 52%, which is a good start in a highly polarized environment, but perhaps a better indicator of the public mood is found in the large shifts in people believing that the country is now on the right track. It hasn’t yet turned positive, but the public mood is overall far more optimistic than under Biden.
In fact, 58% believe that Trump is doing a better job than Biden, and that includes nearly a quarter of Democrats.
Trump has room to grow his rating because a lot of his new policies are quite popular. Eighty-one percent of the public supports the deportation of those here illegally who have committed crimes. And 76% support an all-out effort to eliminate fraud and waste in government.
Seventy percent believe that the government budget is filled with waste and fraud and 69% support the goal of reducing the federal budget by $1 trillion dollars and favor doing it by cutting expenditures rather than raising taxes.
Seventy-two percent support creating a department to eliminate waste and 60% believe that Elon Musk and DOGE are making a difference.
Of course, there are a few thorns on these roses. People do not want DOGE to access sensitive data about themselves and the voters are not supportive of the change to the “Gulf of America.” But these issues should not obscure the basic fact – voters overwhelmingly support closing the border, cutting government expenditures and putting merit over identity politics – three main goals of the new administration.
And Democrats have collapsed to the lowest rating I have ever recorded – just 36% have a favorable rating of Democrats, which means if the midterms were held today, the Democrats would likely face a huge setback – much worse than on election day 2024.
Some Democrats are urging more robust combat and so Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went out and tried that one. His ratings are only sinking, with a net negative of 14 points. This is because most people believe in the policy directions of the new administration and, in my view, are increasingly wondering how they could have voted for a president incapable of effectively governing who was implementing unpopular policies while the world careened out of control.
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The truth is Democrats have supposedly supported border security and reducing fraud and waste in government and so screaming at Musk is not a strategy that is likely to be successful.
A more successful strategy would be to pick a few issues to actually agree we’re on the wrong track, as President Bill Clinton did when he backed a balanced budget and welfare reform. Clinton deployed this strategy to win re-election and his job ratings soared to the mid-70s. I don’t think that anything similar to what we did in 1996 is happening anytime soon.
This means it will be up to Trump to go it alone on issue after issue and avoid easily exploited excesses. He has taken some unorthodox paths here and there are questions about some of them. But in a choice between continuing the policies and administration of Biden and instead moving forward with Trump, it is not a close call for the American people.
A single month will not set these ratings in stone, but it is a clear indication the president is moving in the right direction and far more people now see the country as on the right track than under Biden. Trump has moved aggressively to do a full U-turn on policy and this time he is systematically putting in place a team of people dedicated to carrying out his policies.
Last time, the resistance effectively blunted his presidency and tied him up with special counsels and investigations. This time he is moving forward swiftly and decisively to implement massive policy changes, largely with the backing of most Americans.
