Donald Trump's approval rating has cratered to 42% among registered voters, the lowest number of his second term, according to a new NBC News poll published Saturday. Democrats hold a 5-point lead on the generic congressional ballot. And in case you were wondering whether Republicans have a plan to fix any of this: they do not appear to have a plan to fix any of this.
The Numbers Are Bad. Not Catastrophic. Just Bad.
The NBC News poll, conducted from May 29 through June 7 with 2,400 registered voters, found 49% of respondents prefer Democrats control Congress after this year's elections, compared to 44% who prefer Republicans. Seven percent are unsure, which honestly feels like the most politically exhausted number in the whole survey.
The 5-point Democratic lead is roughly consistent with where things stood in March, when NBC found a 6-point gap. For context, Democrats had a 10-point lead at this same point in the 2018 cycle and went on to net 40 House seats. They were tied with Republicans at this point in 2022 and still managed to limit losses to a handful of seats. So a 5-point lead is not a wave. But it is a real and sustained advantage.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey alongside Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, put it with admirable plainness: 'These are rocky numbers for Republicans, but they are not catastrophic.' Damning with faint praise has never worked so hard.
Trump Is Losing the People Who Were Supposed to Be His
Here is what should genuinely alarm the GOP strategists who are paid to think about this stuff. Among Latino voters, 64% disapprove of Trump's job performance and only 34% approve. Among voters aged 18 to 29, 77% disapprove and just 21% approve. These are groups that Trump either won or dramatically improved with in 2024. The hangover is setting in faster than anyone expected.
Independent voters, the perennial swing bloc that every campaign pretends to care deeply about, lean toward a Democratic Congress by 12 points, 46% to 34%. Two-thirds of independents disapprove of Trump's job performance. You cannot win a midterm hemorrhaging independents at that rate. You can barely win a student council election.
Even within the Republican base, the poll found some softening. In March, 88% of Republicans approved of Trump. That figure has dropped to 82%. The share who "strongly" approve fell from 63% to 58%. These are not collapse numbers, but directionally they are heading the wrong way for a party that needs maximum base enthusiasm to offset a structural deficit in competitive districts.
The Vibes Are Terrible and Getting Worse
Beyond the horse-race numbers, the poll captures something uglier about the national mood. Fifty-six percent of registered voters believe America's best years are behind it. Only 40% believe the best is yet to come. That is not a partisan split so much as a broad, bipartisan collapse of optimism, and it has now been the majority view in four consecutive NBC surveys.
Almost 80% of voters say the American Dream is harder to achieve now than it was a generation ago. Five percent say it is easier. That five percent is doing something very interesting with their lives and we would like to hear about it.
Confidence in the federal government is similarly wrecked. Half of all voters report having very little or no confidence in the government. Fifty-eight percent say the same about Congress specifically, while only 11% say they have a great deal or quite a bit of confidence in Congress. To put that in perspective: Congress is less trusted than used car dealers in most polling. This poll suggests Congress is closing the gap on used car dealers.
What Democrats Actually Need to Win
Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt was careful to frame expectations properly, noting that 2026 does not need to be 2018 for Democrats to take the House. The math is genuinely different. Democrats need a net gain of just three seats to flip the chamber, a much lower bar than the 23 seats they needed in 2018.
Redistricting has compressed the battlefield somewhat, which is why even a robust national environment does not automatically translate into a blowout. But Horwitt told NBC News that Democrats are 'still in a really good position, despite redistricting, to win seats.' The generic ballot lead, combined with the enthusiasm gap showing 95% of Harris 2024 voters backing a Democratic Congress versus 90% of Trump voters backing a Republican one, suggests Democrats have a base mobilization edge heading into November.
The Senate map is a different animal entirely. Democrats would need to net four seats to take the majority, and that means winning in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. That is not impossible, but it requires near-perfect execution in a cycle where nothing is guaranteed.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what this poll is and what it is not. It is not a mandate. It is not a guaranteed wave. It is a snapshot of a country that increasingly thinks the good times are gone, does not trust the people running things, and would prefer, by a modest but real margin, that a different party take over the legislative branch. That is a message. Whether Democrats can turn a message into seats depends on candidate quality, turnout operations, and approximately 400 other variables that no poll can capture in June.
What the poll does make clear is that Trump is a weight around his party's neck, and the weight is getting heavier. A 42% approval rating is not a catastrophe in isolation, but it is his second-term low, it is trending down among his own base, and it is collapsing among the coalition he spent 2024 building. Young voters are gone. Latino voters are gone. Independents are gone. The people still with him are loyal, but loyalty does not change the arithmetic of a midterm election where the other side has more enthusiasm and needs fewer seats.
The Republicans who are hoping Trump will somehow turn this around before November are betting on a man who has spent the last several months making it worse. He has not moderated. He has not pivoted. He has not done anything that historically improves a president's approval rating at this stage of a term. What he has done is give Democrats a year of material to run against. So, sure. Maybe the numbers improve. Or maybe 2026 ends with Republican consultants writing long, expensive post-mortems about how this was always going to happen and nobody could have seen it coming.
