The White House is seen on February 10, 2026.
Gallup, one of the nation’s most recognized polling firms, announced Wednesday that it will no longer track presidential approval or the favorability of political figures. This ends the longest-running continuous effort to measure public opinion of U.S. presidents, a tradition that began during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the late 1930s.
The company says the change reflects a shift in focus toward research on the “issues and conditions that shape people’s lives.” Gallup, which holds some of the longest-running trend data on public opinion and national mood, will continue that work but will no longer “publish assessments of individual political figures.”
The move marks the latest in a series of changes reshaping the polling landscape over recent decades. Many major pollsters, including Gallup, have stepped back from tracking voter preferences—sometimes called horserace polling. Shifts in communication habits have made traditional telephone polling, long considered the gold standard and the method Gallup used for presidential approval surveys, more difficult, time-consuming, and costly. These challenges have driven significant changes in how public opinion research is conducted today.
Longstanding public polling partnerships have also shifted or ended, including CNN’s former collaboration with Gallup and USA Today, CBS News’ partnership with The New York Times, and NBC News’ alliance with The Wall Street Journal.
Gallup’s signature job approval question—“Do you approve or disapprove of the way [name] is handling his job as president?”—first introduced during Harry S. Truman’s presidency, has been widely adopted by hundreds of other researchers. CNN’s most recent tracking of President Donald Trump’s approval includes 134 high-quality polls on that metric conducted by organizations other than Gallup since the start of his second term.
Trump’s current average approval rating in CNN’s Poll of Polls stands at 39% approve to 59% disapprove, closely mirroring Gallup’s final measure from December 2025, which found 36% approving and 59% disapproving.