Gallup's exit
Newsom’s underperformance, elasticity defined, open seat bonanza, the bias in past job approval, trans policy views, national pride, algorithmic feeds shift political views, Jesse Jackson's legacy
📊 Gallup exits presidential approval tracking
After 88 years of tracking how Americans view their president, Gallup has quietly exited the presidential approval polling business. Writing for DDHQ, Geoffrey Skelley breaks down what this means — and why it’s not as surprising as you might think.
The immediate numerical impact on polling averages will be modest, since approval is one of the most-polled questions in American politics. But Gallup’s departure isn’t without consequence. The firm had been a consistent outlier on the low end of Trump’s approval numbers during his second term, so its absence could nudge aggregate averages slightly upward. More broadly, it ends a nine-decade continuous time series that has served as a foundational benchmark for understanding public attitudes toward the presidency.
Gallup’s pullback from political polling has been gradual. After a poor performance in the 2012 presidential race, it stopped surveying elections entirely ahead of 2016. It scaled back from daily to weekly to monthly approval polling over the years that followed. The firm framed the latest decision as a matter of focus — arguing the approval question is so widely polled by others that Gallup can no longer make a distinctive contribution.
Gallup is also a business and a little-known fact is that none of its actual client work has to do with politics. Over the last few decades, Gallup has specialized more and more in helping corporations measure the satisfaction of their workers. If you’ve ever taken the StrengthsFinder, now CliftonStrengths, that’s a Gallup product. Despite its storied heritage, politics has long since had very little to do with the majority of the work Gallup does.
🔵 Newsom is an electoral underperformer
Nate Silver built a simple metric “SB Score” comparing each Democrat’s election margin to the presidential baseline in their state. The results: Gavin Newsom has consistently underperformed Democratic presidential candidates in California. Newsom has rocketed to the top of Democratic primary polls by cultivating an image as the Dems’ Alpha, but he’s actually one of the weaker options electorally.
The standouts by the numbers: Josh Shapiro (+18.0 in 2022), Gretchen Whitmer (+12.8), Ruben Gallego (+7.9 in a state Harris lost by 5.5), and Andy Beshear, winning in deep-red Kentucky while every other Democrat on the ballot lost badly.
🗳️ What is “elasticity” and why does it matter?
Zachary Donnini previews VoteHub’s state elasticity scores. Elasticity measures the degree to which individual states swing more or less than the national average. With their racially polarized electorates, regions like the South swing less, while New England and the West tend to swing more. While the key Senate states year tend to be red states, a number of them like Alaska, Iowa, and Maine are high elasticity, making for more variable outcomes.
🗽 Open seats don’t mean competitive seats
The 2026 cycle is shaping up to have one of the lowest numbers of House incumbents seeking reelection since World War II, with 54 open seats already on the books and more likely to come. But these vacancies are overwhelmingly happening in solid blue and red districts, Kyle Kondik writes. More Republicans are retiring than Democrats, a harbinger of a difficult midterm cycle for the GOP.
🇺🇲 Recency bias drives down approval of past presidents
The best thing for a U.S. president’s rating may be to just leave office and let time pass.
Using ChatGPT, I created this chart of YouGov data of past presidential approval released around President’s Day. I am less interested in the approval of various presidents on their own than in the trend of the presidents of the distant past being more well-remembered than recent ones. Or, on the flip side, presidents more closely tied to present-day political alignments seeing their popularity still bogged down as a result. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, the trend is linear: the further in the past you are, the more popular you are. This helps us see presidential popularity in the context of this temporal bias.
🏳️🌈 Changing attitudes on trans issues
New polling from the liberal publication The Argument finds a shift in a more conservative direction when it comes to transgender issues. A recent poll found that 52% of voters a support laws that restrict transgender people to using bathrooms that match their birth sex, a reversal from a decade ago. However, voters still overwhelmingly support laws banning discrimination against transgender people in housing and employment.
🌎 What makes nations proud?
Pew asked 33,000+ people across 25 countries what makes them proud of their country. The U.S. findings are the most politically fractured. “Freedoms and liberties” top the list at 22%, but Republicans mention it at twice the rate of Democrats (32% vs. 15%). The American people (13%) and the economy/opportunity (11%) round out the top responses. The sharper story is who’s not proud: 20% of Americans went negative when asked the question, and the partisan gap is enormous. 32% of Democrats vs. 8% of Republicans said something critical.
But Pew also surveyed 24 other countries, and the differences across countries are also striking. Americans are far more likely than any other country to cite their freedom as a point of pride, while Swedes say their government, Italians their culture, and Greeks their history.
In another quick exercise of AI-assisted data analysis, I told Claude to extract data from the topline into a single table for easy reference, and then conduct a cluster analysis grouping countries by shared sources of pride. Then I told it to visualize these groups on a world map and it gave me this.
🔬 Algorithmic feeds change political attitudes
Switching from a chronological to algorithmic X feed pushed users to be more conservative. Going from an algorithmic back to a chronological feed had no effect. The feed switch had a greater effect on Republicans and independents than Democrats.
🔵 Reflecting on Jesse Jackson’s campaigns
Steve Kornacki looks back on the political legacy of Jesse Jackson, who passed away this week, and specifically his performances at the first major Black major presidential candidate.
Jackson was able to secure a solid block of pledge delegates in both 1984 and 1988 primaries thanks to strong support from Black voters. Voting was highly racially polarized at the time and Jackson received few votes from whites. A bit of lore is that the decline in Bill Clinton’s standing among Democrats came when he likened Barack Obama’s performance in South Carolina to Jackson’s, who was seen as more of an identity politics candidate than Obama, who had succeeded in building a cross-racial coalition.
