Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Trump's low approval ratings
PBS News Hour - Segments
PBS NewsHour
4.1 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | A new poll shows what Americans think of President Trump and his policies, and it's not good news for the White House. |
| 0:06.0 | For more, we turn to our Politics Monday duo. |
| 0:08.3 | That's Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR. |
| 0:13.1 | It's always great to see you both. |
| 0:14.2 | So Amy, the latest PBS News NPR Marist poll shows a majority of Americans disapprove of the job that President Trump is doing, |
| 0:21.7 | with a majority strongly disapproving. |
| 0:24.9 | How significant is the intensity of that opposition at this point in his term? |
| 0:29.5 | Yeah, well, we also took this new poll from PBS and put it into our Cook Political Report poll tracker, which is an aggregator of 21 national polls. |
| 0:42.3 | And what we found this week is that the president actually is at his lowest standing of his second term at this point. |
| 0:49.3 | And it's really driven by some key constituents that have soured on him since he was first sworn in. |
| 0:57.1 | Latino voters, younger voters, independent voters, those were all critical to his success in 2024. |
| 1:03.7 | But the group that really is the most fascinating to me, and I think it's going to be really important |
| 1:07.4 | as we watch these next few months go forward are the voters that we always |
| 1:11.9 | think of as his core constituencies, white working class voters who have long been very much |
| 1:18.6 | behind the president. We're seeing some significant slippage there, both in the PBS poll and |
| 1:23.5 | in the Cook Political Report aggregator. And these are the kinds of voters that, you could argue, |
| 1:30.4 | the slippage is really driven by views on the economy, |
| 1:34.5 | the frustration about inflation and the cost of living. |
| 1:39.3 | And when you look at the battleground states |
| 1:41.8 | that are going to determine the makeup of the House, |
| 1:44.0 | but especially the Senate, they run through places where white working class voters make |
| 1:49.6 | up a significant portion of the electorate. |
... |
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