President Donald Trump’s strong approval rating fell to 19 percent in an October Napolitan News Service survey, its lowest level across the series. The decline in Trump’s strong approval rating matters because Republicans are asking voters to treat the president as a stand-in candidate weeks before the November 3 midterms. The president himself has asked his supporters to act as though he were on the ballot, a campaign message he has repeated often in recent weeks, as forecasts have shifted to favor Democrats to gain control of both chambers.
VoteHub’s October 15 forecast gave Democrats an 84 percent chance of controlling the House and a 59 percent chance of taking the Senate. Prediction markets also favored unified Democratic control, priced at 63 percent on Polymarket and 62 percent on Kalshi, although those figures reflect traders’ collective expectations rather than polling or a guaranteed result. GOP contenders fighting for control of Congress must mobilize Trump’s coalition while facing evidence that opposition to his presidency is both broader and more intense.
But the administration rejects the suggestion that Trump has become an electoral liability. A widening intensity gap may make persuasion harder and leave Republican campaigns increasingly dependent on turnout. That 27-point difference between those who strongly approve and those who strongly disapprove of Trump’s job performance was the largest negative intensity gap in the published series, exceeding the negative 25-point readings recorded in four earlier surveys.
The previous poll, conducted from September 28 to October 6, placed strong approval at 20 percent and strong disapproval at 43 percent. Movement between two individual surveys may reflect sampling variation. The broader sequence is more politically useful: strong approval has remained between 19 and 25 percent across the displayed readings, whereas strong disapproval has ranged from 40 to 47 percent.
Adding respondents who approved “somewhat” produces a less severe result than the intensity figures alone. The headline finding is not that the president has lost every voter who previously backed him, but that the firmly supportive share has reached the bottom of this particular run while emphatic opposition remains much larger. According to the published methodology, quotas were applied and the results were lightly weighted by geography, gender, age, race, education, internet use and political party.
Napolitan News Service paid for the survey as part of its service for Gold Circle members. The findings arrive as Trump tours battlegrounds and urges voters to “close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot.” That strategy puts the president’s personal drawing power at the center of the Republican closing argument. It also creates a difficult equation for candidates who need loyal MAGA voters without intensifying opposition among Americans dissatisfied with the administration.
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