Tỷ lệ chấp thuận quản lý chính phủ của Trump giảm xuống 33% khi kết thúc đóng cửa 43 ngày

An AP-NORC poll released November 12, 2025 found that 33% of U.S. adults approved of how Trump was managing the federal government, down from 43% when AP-NORC last asked in March. The survey reached 1,143 adults from November 6 to 10 through NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

The decline came from inside Trump's coalition. Republican approval of his government management fell from 81% in March to 68%, and independents dropped from 38% to 25% in the AP-NORC data. Democrats stayed overwhelmingly opposed, with 95% disapproving.

The erosion was specific, not general. Trump's overall job approval held at 36% in the same AP-NORC poll, nearly identical to October's 36%, and his ratings on the economy and immigration barely moved. The drop concentrated in one question: how well he runs the government.

That gap separates how voters feel about Trump from how they judge his competence in a crisis. PBS NewsHour noted the management rating sank even as the president's personal standing with his base stayed mostly intact.

The poll landed during the 43-day government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history, which ran from October 1 until the House voted 222-209 to reopen the government on November 12. The previous record was 35 days, set during Trump's own first term in 2018 and 2019.

The shutdown turned a budget fight into household harm. Roughly 750,000 federal employees were furloughed, nearly 14,000 air traffic controllers worked without pay while the FAA ordered flight cuts at dozens of airports, and food assistance for about 42 million people was thrown into doubt before the shutdown ended.

A second pollster reached the same conclusion through a different method. Gallup's survey, conducted by telephone from November 3 to 25 and released November 28, put Trump's overall approval at 36%, a second-term low. Republican approval fell seven points to 84%, and independents dropped eight points to 25%, the worst independent rating of either Trump term.

Gallup also tracked the shutdown's cost to Congress. Approval of Congress sat at 14%, and Republicans' approval of the Republican-led Congress collapsed from 54% in September to 23% during the shutdown. When a probability panel and a telephone sample land in the same place, the finding is hard to dismiss as one survey's noise.

Trump rejected the polling outright. In a November 10 interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, he called voter anxiety about prices 'a con job by the Democrats,' described 'a manufactured economy,' and said 'I think polls are fake.' Ingraham, a longtime ally, pushed back on air, telling Trump that voters were genuinely worried about affordability.

The White House took the same line. A spokesman, Davis Ingle, called the 2024 election 'the ultimate poll' and pointed to the nearly 80 million people who voted for Trump as the only measure that counted.

The polls followed a bad night for Republicans at the ballot box. On November 4, Democrats swept the year's marquee races, electing Abigail Spanberger governor of Virginia, Mikie Sherrill governor of New Jersey, and Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City.

Both AP-NORC and Gallup fielded their surveys around those results, and Gallup tied the Democratic gains and the shutdown together as warning signs for the GOP heading into the 2026 midterms, when Republicans will defend full control of Washington.

Presidential approval has worked as a midterm referendum since George Gallup began measuring it in the late 1930s. Gallup built the question so the public could grade a president between elections, and the number has tracked midterm outcomes ever since.

The sharpest example is Harry Truman. His approval sank to about 32% by the 1946 midterms amid postwar strikes and inflation, and Republicans gained 55 House seats and 12 Senate seats to seize both chambers. Trump's 36% in November 2025 put him in similar territory a year before his own midterms.

Trump's claim of strength ran opposite to the data. On November 22 he posted on Truth Social that he had 'just gotten the highest poll numbers of my political career,' a statement PolitiFact rated False because every major aggregator showed his strongest ratings came in January and had fallen since.

Analyst Nate Silver argued the slide could last. He wrote that Trump's heightened unpopularity 'might be here to stay', noting Trump had gone weeks without a positive net approval reading in his tracker as the shutdown dragged on.

The numbers had faces. Beverly Lucas, 78, a retired educator and Republican from Ormond Beach, Florida, told AP the second term felt like 'having a petulant child in the White House, with unmitigated power.' She said a shutdown that left civilians unpaid meant leaders should 'be addressing these conflicts like intelligent people and not thugs and bullies on the playground.'

The two surveys measured views like hers in different ways. AP-NORC recruits its AmeriSpeak panel through random address-based sampling and in-person outreach, while Gallup dials random phone numbers. Both are probability samples, which is why analysts treat them as more reliable than opt-in online polls that let anyone join.