That’s how one would describe the latest UT/Texas Politics Project poll numbers for Donald Trump and Texas Republicans.
The dominant political narrative for much of the past year has been that Democrats are sitting pretty heading into the 2026 midterms, while Republicans will be swimming against an upstream current, weighed down by the heavy millstone of President Donald Trump strapped tightly around their necks.
But a newly released poll of Texas voters suggests that while Republicans have more reason for worry than celebration 11 months before the November election, there is a largely buried — and perhaps unrecognized — glimmer of hope that they might catch a break in the fall.
Let’s get the GOP’s bad news out of the way first in the poll of 1,200 self-identified registered voters conducted by the Texas Politics Project and released Friday. Trump’s approval rating in Republican-led Texas is underwater. So are those of pretty much every Republican holding statewide office and those running for statewide office.
On a dozen issues state leaders tackled in the 2025 Legislature, respondents in the poll, taken Dec. 9-13, gave failing marks to 10. And on eight of them, the disapproval-to-approval ratio hovered close to 2-1.
Ironically, even that faint ray of sunshine for Texas Republicans looks, at first blush, like another cloud. It has to do with the economy, both at the national and personal levels, and the overall direction of the state and the nation.
More than one-third of respondents said the national economy was in poor shape, and only 24% said they themselves were doing OK financially. And that, paradoxically, is the good news.
Here’s why. In February, only 20% of Texans said they were happy with their own financial well-being. That survey came one month into Trump’s return to the White House and represented a 5-point drop from when Democratic President Joe Biden was still in charge. Confidence in the national economy had been dropping since April, falling to 27% in August. The latest poll shows a 7-point rebound.
[…]
Also, the poll suggests that, as in the 2018 midterms, Trump may once again be a gift to Democrats — given that midterm elections are often a referendum on the current occupant of the White House. Not only does he have a 44% approval to 50% disapproval rating, Trump’s standing among Texas Republicans is down 10 points since returning to power.
To be fair, that drop was from 92% to 82%. But in each of the six polls taken by the Texas Politics project over the past year, Trump’s approval rating among his own party has been lower than in the one before.
See here for our last visit to this polling data. I’m interested in this as a way to possibly gauge what the November electoral environment might be like. As noted in that earlier post, Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick recorded their lowest ever approval ratings in that September poll, for which quarterly data goes back over a decade, while Ken Paxton had his second-worst showing. All three had declined in each of the three quarters following a strong result in December 2024. Would that continue, and if so how far would it go? Here, from the linked poll summary page, is a roundup of the relevant approval results:
Gov Greg Abbott: 43% approve; 46% disapprove
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: 31% approve; 42% disapprove
Attorney General Ken Paxton: 29% approve; 46% disapprove
U.S. Senator John Cornyn: 25% approve; 46% disapprove
President Donald Trump
Overall: 44% approve; 50% disapprove
Republicans: 82% approve; 11% disapprove
Democrats: 5% approve; 93% disapprove
Independents: 24% approve; 63% disapprove
The short answer is that Abbott and Patrick both bounced back a bit, Abbott more than Patrick, while Paxton‘s disapproval number ticked up a point and his approval number stayed the same; he’s now tied for his highest-ever disapproval rate while still second-worst on approval. Trump’s numbers remain in a tight band, though the steady drip-drip-drip of his approval rating among Republicans continues to fascinate me. I feel like if anything is going to contribute to dampened Republican turnout, it will be that.
So now we wait for the March numbers to see if Abbott and Patrick bounce back some more – Abbott is not used to being in negative territory in this poll – or if that was a blip. My thesis is that these low numbers among the Texas leaders, especially for Abbott, is a key difference from the environment in 2018. How much of a factor that may be, I can’t say. I’m just noting it for the record. And I will keep an eye on it.