President Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy has plummeted to a new low, according to a NPR/PBS News/Marist poll out Wednesday.
The newly released poll found that just 36% of Americans said they approved of Trump’s approach to the economy. This marks Trump’s worst economic approval rating over the six years that Marist has been asking the question, according to NPR.
Moreover, 37% of voters now trust Democrats to handle the economy, while 33% said the same about Republicans, according to the poll.
The survey also showed that 49% of Americans who live in rural areas in the U.S. said they disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, while just 43% approve. Meanwhile, 48% of white women without college degrees disapprove of his approach to the economy, compared to 41% who approve, according to the poll.
“Over the past year, the Trump administration has delivered critical progress to turn the page on Joe Biden’s economic disaster: cooling inflation, rising real wages, private-sector job growth, and trillions in investments to make and hire in America,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. “The Trump administration will continue to build on this progress in the new year to continue delivering economic relief for the American people.”
The only time in that period that Americans held a similarly poor outlook on a U.S. president’s approach to the economy in the Marist survey was in February 2022, when former President Joe Biden was still in office, NPR reported. Biden’s Democratic Party still went to have a better than expected performance in that year’s midterm elections.
Meanwhile, in the suburbs, Trump received a 60% disapproval rating on the economy and a 33% approval rating, according to the survey. Trump’s overall job approval rating was just 38%, marking the lowest level of his second term and the lowest number he has received in Marist’s surveys since April 2018, the poll shows.
When voters were asked about what their top concern in regards to the economy was, 45% said prices, 18% said housing, 15% said tariffs and 10% said job security, according to the poll.
Total federal government employment declined by 6,000 in November, after shedding 162,000 federal government payrolls in October, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the U.S. unemployment rate in November changed little from September at 4.6%, the BLS reported.
“The slow labor market reflects a small business economy still struggling to beat the hangover from the Biden administration’s affordability crisis,” Job Creators Network CEO Alfredo Ortiz said Tuesday in a statement responding to the release of the November jobs data. “However, the onset of numerous pro-growth policies, including lower interest rates, low inflation, deregulation, falling gas prices, and tax cuts, will give America’s small business job creation engine the fuel it needs to improve hiring in the months ahead.”
“The current labor market picture shows Republicans must double down on these pro-small-business policies, including passing House healthcare reform legislation that expands association health plans, breaking a major Main Street shackle,” Ortiz continued.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Tuesday statement that American workers’ “wages are rising, prices are falling, trillions of dollars in investments are pouring into our country, and the American economy is primed to boom in 2026.”
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.3% on a seasonally adjusted basis in September, following a 0.4% increase in August, the BLS reported on Oct. 24. The Federal Reserve notably cut interest rates for the third time this year on Dec. 10, following Trump’s calls to drastically lower rates.
Trump gave himself an “A++++++” rating on the economy during an interview with Politico last week, despite recent reports of some Americans being concerned about affordability. Democrats have reportedly been attempting to highlight the GOP’s affordability crisis ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“The affordability crisis is not a hoax,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a Dec. 5 post to X. “And the American people know it.”
Still, most Americans said they trust the GOP and Trump’s ability to handle the economy over Democrats, per a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released on Dec. 8.
Additionally, a National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics survey released on Monday found that a record 158.9 million Americans are projected to shop on the last Saturday before Christmas, marking an increase from 157.2 million shoppers in 2024 and up from the previous record of 158.5 million in 2022.
The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll was conducted from Dec. 8-11, and surveyed 1,440 adults through live interviewers, text and online. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
The survey includes 1,261 registered voters. There was a plus or minus 3.4 percentage point margin of error among registered voters.
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