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Wow. A lot of people still can’t admit they were wrong.

Of all the things that start chipping away at his base, immigration was my last choice. I though convicted felon/rapist would do it.

You think the election will mean anything.

How very innocent.

The worst is yet to come if they manage to put Vance in power instead of the orange guy…

Given the unprecedented abuse of power and overwhelming evidence of corruption, the fact he still has that much approval only serves to show how deeply flawed is the distribution of power in the US.

Big corpo lobbying paved the way for this brand of extremist cronyism that provides for the biggest players willing to grease the president directly, even circumventing the legislative bodies.

I bet relatively smaller players are as flabbergasted as reasonable people and left-wing people. But this is what happens after decades of big shareholders being able to shape politics.

I’d like this poll to be representative. But these poll aggregators tell a different story:

• https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
• https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin

He doesn't give a fuck. He already has the power he wants and he'll never give it away. He only leaves that office in a body-bag.

Sure.

Schumer is alllllmost ready to write that strongly worded letter. He can practically taste the envelope glue.

I can't see it making a difference, they will still vote red no matter who.

Story of his life. Everyone hates him because he lies, steals, sues people into oblivion and threatens them. Somehow that's helped him fail upwards. Lather, rinse, repeat, constantly moving onto bigger targets. He will never, ever stop until his body quits, and he always has hordes of enablers to ensure he extracts what he wants from his next victim. He is evil incarnate.

He doesn't care. He doesn't need anyone's votes anymore.

I hope that translates into something meaningful happening in the midterms. Of course, even if the election does end up being a big rebuke of Trump, that will hardly bring an end to the conflict. We're probably only just getting started.

Who cares? Unless republican voters suddenly discover morality Trump doesn’t matter. Disapproval of a single person like Trump is immune to the republican voter block. Conservative Americans ensure the worst of the world… you won’t see meaningful change until you address that group.

Nazi party in America means America is a Nazi country. Get specific with the cure.

They have been saying that since 2016.

Oh? Are a bunch of racist boomers dying? I genuinely hope so...

The fact that there are still 35-40% of voters who still think he's doing a good job is wild. As is the fact that no matter what he does that number will never change.

"Across the board" - except there's still a solid 36% who still back him. "One third of your country is willing to murder another third of your country, while the last third stands aside and watches."

And it doesn’t matter a single bit.

The thing is mostly that, while unpopularity does have an impact, that impact is probably going to be somewhat bounded regarding the Trump administration.

Trump cannot be voted out in the midterms, and the US does not have snap elections the way parliamentary systems do, so absent him dying in office or otherwise becoming incapacitated, he will probably be around for the rest of his term.

In general, the popularity (or lack thereof) of the President affects turnout and how people vote for legislative representatives in the midterm elections.

For the Trump administration, there are a couple of major inflection points that I'm aware of.

• Democrats take control of the House in the midterm elections. I would guess that at this point, this is most-likely going to happen, and most of what I've read

including from the Republican side of the aisle

agrees with this. The major impact of this will be that Democrats will be able to initiate Congressional inquiries and demand that the Executive turn over a lot of information about its activities. As I recall reading, the Trump administration specifically directed its the Executive not to respond to requests for information from Congressional representatives in anything other than situations where they were legally bound to do so, which I understand breaks with convention. Basically, the way this works is that a simple majority has to start an inquiry, and put people in front of the House, and then representatives from both sides of the aisle are allowed to require them to testify. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican senator who has been critical of Trump, had some comment a while back about how the only way she found out about things was in the news, so I expect that Republican legislators probably aren't getting much information either. I'd assume that the Democrats will use this both the present the administration in a negative light, and to turn up information damaging to the administration. It will let the Democrats block legislation that they don't like, though I'd assume that there will be an effort to pass any legislation that they might block and that the administration wants in the first half of the term. If they find that Trump has broken the law, they can impeach Trump, but this has limited impact (other than acting as condemnation of Trump) unless they can get a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to convict and remove him from office; this would require a number of Republican senators to agree that he needs to be out of office, and I'm skeptical that this will happen unless there is material that comes out that is considerably more damning than anything thus far.

• Democrats take control of the Senate in the midterm elections. What I've read is that this is possible, but unlikely. Nate Silver had an article some time back talking about how is was more-likely than one might expect (generally, the Republicans have an advantage in the Senate, as they dominate in more low-population states), and I've seen several other articles saying that while odds are they will not, it is a real possibility, not to be dismissed. I don't know, off the cuff, what impact this will have. It would permit Democrats to block Trump's nominations for people if he dismisses them, which might give cabinet members considerably more ability to disagree with him, if they want to do so. I don't know of anything that a simple majority in both House and Senate buys the Democrats. It'd let them pass legislation that Trump disagrees with in Congress, but Trump can veto it; overriding a veto would require a two-thirds supermajority in both houses.

The US has weak party discipline; legislators are less-accountable to the party as a whole than in many countries. It's possible that some close votes could be flipped by legislators not voting strictly along party lines. For example, some Republican legislators voted to release Epstein information.

I don't know what, if any, impact there will be from control shift regarding the administration asserting emergency powers to impose tariffs. My understanding is that there are currently lawsuits underway, which the Trump administration is most-likely expected to lose, with a major ruling expected in the next week, but that there may be other legal routes for the administration to effectively impose tariffs. I am not sure that Trump's approval ratings will have an impact here.

Trump's approval probably will have an impact on his influence on Republican politicians. Trump has, in the past, threatened to and endorsed primary election opponents of those Republican politicians who disagree with him. The value of a Trump endorsement is predicated on Trump's popularity, so Trump will generally lose sway over Republican politicians if he becomes less popular.

EDIT: The Executive mostly gets to run foreign policy, so I think that regardless of what happens in Congress, aside from tariffs (which are important and are normally a Congressional power) and extended troop deployments, US foreign policy will probably continue to be largely directed by the Trump administration.

EDIT2: Oh, winning the House will give the Democrats ability to block and thus horse-trade on the federal budget. They did so before, but that was relying on the fillibuster. The Senate can always eliminate the power; it's simply a convention built on internal rules set by a simple majority in the Senate itself, which is presently controlled by the Republicans. While adverse to breaking with convention, in a serious enough case, a majority in the Senate could choose to simply remove that power from the minority. In contrast, there is no recourse if the House doesn't want to pass a budget. Pretty much all of what the President does depends on having funds to do it, and he doesn't get money unless Congress chooses to give it to him, so while it's not a very flexible tool, it is a powerful one.