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Now, onto the polls.

This Week Across Poll Vault

One hundred and two polls crossed the feed this week across nine topics. Electoral Politics led the volume with 26 polls, followed by Economy & Trade at 22 and AI & Tech Policy at 16. But the story wasn't confined to any single topic — it was in how the same signal kept showing up in different rooms: the public is rejecting specific pieces of the agenda faster and more broadly than any one approval number captures.

33%

Trump's approval in the latest UMass Amherst tracking poll — his lowest of the second term

UMass Amherst, April 2026

UMass Amherst's April wave clocks Trump at 33% approval against 62% disapproval — down from 44% last April and 38% in July. On the issues it's worse: 24% approve on inflation, 28% on tariffs, 30% on jobs, 35% on immigration. 63% say he handled the Iran war poorly. The right-direction number sits at 23%.

None of that would be worth a headline on its own. What makes it worth one is that every other pollster in the field landed in the same neighborhood this week. Civiqs put national approval at 38% in a sample of 95,408. Daily Mail / JL Partners called 43% the second-term low. TIPP Insights marked 39% favorability as another second-term floor. And Verasight found Trump under 50% approval in 135 Republican-held House and Senate seats — the kind of political geography that historically precedes a midterm reset.

The convergence is the story. Pollsters using different methods, samples, and house effects are all telling the same version of it.

If you want to know why those approval numbers aren't ambient noise, look at what happens when voters are asked about a specific trade-off.

Data for Progress — a Democratic polling firm, worth flagging up front — put this question to 1,213 likely voters:

A few things to note about the wording. It doesn't attribute the proposal to any party — not "congressional Republicans," not "the administration." It just says "Lawmakers in Congress." That's the less leading version of this question, stripping out the partisan cue that usually pulls co-partisans toward support. And despite that, the result broke hard in one direction.

69% opposed it. Only 22% supported it. That's a -47 point margin. The breakdown by party is where it gets interesting: 84% of Democrats opposed, 69% of Independents opposed, and — critically — 55% of Republicans opposed, with just 33% in support.

The political read is worth dwelling on. Republicans broadly supported the decision to strike Iran when it was framed as a national-security choice. What this question tests is something different: the cost of the war, made concrete and paired with a domestic sacrifice. The moment the trade-off is specific — your health care spending, for their war funding — a third of the Republican coalition walks away. If the war drags on, if the price tag grows, if more supplementals get attached to domestic cuts, that 55% Republican opposition number is the canary. The base may back the war. The base does not, so far, back the bill for it.

This is the mechanism behind the UMass numbers. Voters aren't just grading vibes. They're being handed tangible trade-offs, and they're declining them — even ones their own side is making.

The World Is Pulling Away

Three different foreign polls showed up in the feed this week — in Southeast Asia, across Europe, and in Spain specifically — and every one of them is moving in the same direction: away from the United States.

Southeast Asia is voting with its feet. The annual ISEAS State of Southeast Asia survey — 2,008 elite respondents across government, academia, media, and business in the ten-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc — asked the forced-choice question the entire region hates: if you had to align with the U.S. or China, which? 52% picked China. 48% picked the U.S. That reverses last year's result. Pessimism about U.S. relations nearly doubled in a single wave, from 14.2% to 29.5%.

The internals are more interesting than the headline. The region isn't embracing Beijing — it's fleeing Washington. 55% of respondents call for greater ASEAN unity to resist pressure from both great powers. Japan (65.6%) and the EU (55.9%) are the most trusted external partners — not China, not the U.S. ISEAS itself describes the shift as "a reactive retreat from the U.S., not a structural preference for China."

Europe is pulling the same direction. A six-nation Politico European Pulse survey (n=6,000) found that, on average, 36% of Europeans now consider the United States a threat — compared with 29% for China. In France (37% US vs. 43% China) and Belgium (42% vs. 38%), the two are roughly on par. Spain is the extreme case: 51% of Spaniards described the U.S. as a threat and just 17% called it a close ally. Only Poland stayed broadly pro-U.S., and even there 13% named America a threat.

Spain takes it further. The El País / Cadena SER / 40dB poll asked Spaniards to name the world leaders they consider threats to world peace. Trump came out on top at 81% — higher than Putin (79%) and Netanyahu (71%). Roughly 70% of Spaniards describe themselves as pessimistic about the future of the world, and about half believe a global war and democratic backsliding in the U.S. and EU are real possibilities.

Reactive retreats can harden into permanent ones. The cost of winning any of these countries back compounds the longer the signal keeps arriving — and the signal arriving from this week's data is unusually loud.

This week Poll Vault tracked 13 foreign policy polls — see them all →

A few more findings that didn't warrant a full section but are worth your attention:

🤖 Bipartisan appetite for federal AI rules. Leading the Future / Tarrance Group finds 64% of Florida voters prefer federal regulation of AI by Congress over state-level oversight — with more than 8 in 10 of those holding the view strongly. 54% of all Florida voters and 75% of Republicans support Trump's National AI Policy Framework. The culture war around AI hasn't crystallized yet, and the consensus for coherent federal rules is wider than the debate on cable news suggests.
🏥 Trust in AI for health care drops 10 points. Ohio State University / SSRS finds public comfort with AI-assisted health care fell roughly 10 points in a single year. The gap between how fast AI is being deployed in clinical settings and how fast trust is catching up keeps widening.
💸 Seven in ten Americans aren't thriving. CNBC / SurveyMonkey (n=3,494) finds only 5% of Americans describe themselves as "thriving." 70% say they're "just managing," "struggling," or "falling behind." 59% live paycheck-to-paycheck — 74% of Millennials. 39% have used a credit card to pay for groceries. The affordability squeeze stopped being a lower-income story a long time ago.
⛽ Inflation expectations jump. The New York Fed's consumer expectations survey pushed one-year inflation expectations to 3.4%, with Middle East-driven gas prices the primary mover. The consumer read is once again running ahead of the political read.
🏠 Mayors unify on housing supply. A Boston University survey of U.S. mayors finds three-quarters now agree that building more housing will lower prices. Supply-side housing economics, long a political football, has crossed a meaningful threshold among the people actually running cities.

The Medicaid-for-war trade in the supplemental package. Data for Progress tested a live policy debate. Watch whether the House package pairs Medicaid cuts with Iran funding, or whether the polling forces a cleaner bill.
Republican war support vs. war cost. The 55% Republican opposition in the DFP poll is the most politically interesting number of the week. Watch GOP primary polling over the next month for any signs that the base's enthusiasm for the Iran strike is cooling once the price tag is attached.
AI framework momentum. With 64% federal-preference in Florida and Republican support near 75%, expect a real fight over preemption. The policy politics on AI is about to heat up.
Approval floor testing. Four different pollsters used the phrase "second-term low" this week. The open question is whether 33–39% is a floor or a landing.

What Else We Tracked This Week

Majority of U.S. Voters Back Impeaching Trump Just 14 Months Into Term — Lake Research Partners
Both Parties Underwater, But Democrats' Brand Deficit Is Deeper Heading Into Midterms — CNN / SSRS
GOP Candidates Lead Sherrod Brown Among Ohio Union Voters in 2026 Races — Coalition to Protect American Workers
Slim Virginia Majority Backs Mid-Decade Redistricting, But GOP More Fired Up to Vote No — Washington Post / Schar School
NYC Voters Give Mamdani Positive Marks at 100 Days, But Most Say City on Wrong Track — PIX11 / Emerson College
NJ Teens Spend 4+ Hours Daily on Social Media While Parents Underestimate the Toll — Rutgers-Eagleton/SSRS
Oklahoma GOP Primary Voters Near-Unanimous on AI Child Safety Protections — Amber Integrated
Massie Holds Lead Over Trump-Backed Challenger With Six Weeks to KY-4 Primary — Big Data Poll / Quantus Insights
Six in Ten Americans Now View Israel Unfavorably, a Near-20-Point Swing Since 2022 — Pew Research Center

Until next time, Alex Lundry

Due Data is powered by Poll Vault. Get the full data behind every poll mentioned above.

Losing the Room

This Week Across Poll Vault

Approval Cracks From Every Side

The Trade Voters Won't Take

The World Is Pulling Away

The Crosscurrents

Next Week

What Else We Tracked This Week