How popular is Donald Trump?

How popular is Donald Trump?

Donald Trump’s net approval rating ticked up slightly to -13.6 today, after dropping back to a second term low of -15.0 on Friday. Why? Mostly because of an InsiderAdvantage poll that showed Trump with a positive net approval rating of +4. That’s the second InsiderAdvantage poll released in the past month with Trump above water.
These are meaningfully different results than most other pollsters are getting: the last poll where Trump had a positive net approval rating (+1) was fielded by RMG Research back in December. InsiderAdvantage has a decent pollster rating (B+), but the firm has been consistently bullish on Trump 2.0 relative to the average pollster, so these results aren’t exactly surprising.
They do, however, provide a good example of why we apply a house effects adjustment, which accounts for persistent differences between a firm’s results and those of other presidential approval polls. Because InsiderAdvantage’s results tend to be more favorable for Trump than average, we shave off a proportion of that systematic difference. That adjustment (which we apply to every poll) means that the latest InsiderAdvantage poll enters our average as Trump -4 instead of Trump +4. -EMD, 2/19/26