President Donald Trump keeps insisting the economic polls are “fake,” but the numbers tell a very different story, and one of CNN’s top data guys just walked through how bad it really looks.
On a recent segment with anchor Kate Bolduan, CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten said flatly that Trump’s economic standing has cratered as voters deal with stubbornly high prices. The shift, Enten argued, is not some small wobble. It is a collapse.
Bolduan started with the obvious question. “Have polls always been down for Trump when it comes to inflation?” she asked.
“No, no, not at all,” Enten replied. He pointed back to October 2024 when Trump was still seen as the stronger hand on the cost of living. “Go back to October of 2024. Who did Americans trust more on inflation, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? They trusted Donald Trump by nine points on average.”
That cushion is gone because, according to Enten, those same surveys now show Trump’s net approval on inflation “way, way, way underwater, 26 points underwater on his net approval on inflation.”
The message to Trump was sharp with the data analyst stating, “So it’s not that the polls are fake, it’s that the American people have turned against you, Mr. President, you’ve gone from leading by nine points on inflation to being 26 points underwater. You’re doing something very wrong in the minds of the American public.”
Bolduan did not sugarcoat it. “Negative 26. That’s a problem,” she said.
For Trump, who has spent months claiming that survey firms underestimate his support, there was more bad news. Enten gamed out the former president’s favorite hypothetical, that the polling is simply off the way it was in 2024.
“You see this switcheroo, right, going from plus 9 to minus 26. That’s a move of over 30 points in the wrong direction,” Enten said. “But let’s say the polls are off. Let’s take up Donald Trump on his hypothetical, right? Oh, the polls always underestimate me. Well, here’s Trump’s net approval rating on inflation. Currently, he’s 26 points below water. If the polls are off like they were in 2024, he still got a Titanic sized problem. He’s then 24 points underwater on inflation.”
In other words, even if the survey error breaks exactly the way Trump says it will, he is still in dreadful shape with voters on the issue they say matters most.
“So yes, the polls underestimated him, but just by about a point and a half in 2024,” Enten continued. “He would still have a massive, massive, massive problem on inflation even if the polls were off like they were a year ago.”
And there is another risk for Trump and his party as Enten noted that in recent races “the polls are absolutely awful” at catching late Democratic strength, pointing to contests in Virginia and New Jersey where Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger beat their polling by sizable margins. That raises the possibility that Republicans are being overestimated this time, not shortchanged.
“The bottom line is this, the polls on inflation are absolutely awful for Donald Trump,” Enten concluded. “Even if they were slightly better, he’d still be way, way below water. But the problem … might be even worse than the polls suggest.” Voters do not need a chart to know why, he added, because “people feel it in their pocketbooks every day and they see it as the prices climb ever higher when they try and purchase their groceries.”
For a president who built his brand on economic swagger, that kind of slide is not just a bad news cycle. It is a warning flare.
