Public opinion favors Supreme Court decision limiting Trump tariffs

In Jan. 63% said Court should rule against Trump, including 33% of Republicans

On Feb. 20 the United State Supreme Court ruled against President Trump’s authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. The case is Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump.

Public views of the case have been consistently in favor of upholding limits on the tariff authority since the Marquette Law School national poll first asked about this case in September. The table shows opinion over three national surveys.

The partisan divide on the tariff case is somewhat less stark than on many issues, with a significant minority of Republicans opposing the president’s position. A third of Republicans in the January poll wanted the Court to strike down the tariffs, an increase from 26% in November. More than two-thirds of independents favored overturning Trump’s use of tariffs, as did an overwhelming 92% of Democrats.

Approval of Trump’s handling of tariffs has consistently been below his overall approval rating in Marquette Law School national polls, with approval on tariffs below 40% in each of five polls since May 2025. In January, 26% of Republicans disapproved of Trump’s handling of tariffs, as did 71% of independents and 95% of Democrats.

A majority of the public, 56% say that tariffs hurt the U.S. economy, while 30% think they help the economy and 14% say tariffs don’t make much difference. Views of the effect of tariffs are related to opinion of how the Court should rule, as shown in the table below. Those who think tariffs help the economy are in favor of overturning the limits on the president’s authority, 77%, though even among this group more than one-in-five think the president’s authority should be limited, 23%. Among those who say tariffs harm the economy, 89% think the Court should limit presidential authority. Opinion is evenly divided among those who say tariffs don’t make much difference.

The Court and the President

A large majority of adults believe that the president must obey a Supreme Court decision, 82% with 17% who say the president can ignore a decision with which he disagrees. These views have been quite stable in 10 Marquette polls since 2019, never dipping below 76% saying the president must obey the Court, and not below 83% since Jan. 2025.

This belief in the authority of the Court is not a partisan matter. Among Republicans 76% say the president must obey the Court, as do 79% of independents and 90% of Democrats.

In January, a majority, 57% said the Court was going out of it’s way to avoid ruling against Trump, while 43% said the Court was not doing so. Among Republicans 34% thought the Court was avoiding ruling against Trump, as did 59% of independents and 78% of Democrats.

Approval of the Supreme Court

Approval of the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen since September, from 50% to 44% in January. Approval fell sharply in 2022 following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision which overturned abortion rights established in Roe v. Wade. Net approval, the percentage approval minus disapproval, remained negative throughout the remainder of 2022 and through 2024. In January 2025 net approval moved up into positive territory before turning down in July. The table shows approval of the Court since September 2020.

About the Marquette Law School Poll

The survey was conducted Jan. 21-28, 2026, interviewing 1003 adults nationwide, with a margin of error of +/-3.4 percentage points.

Interviews were conducted using the SSRS Opinion Panel, a national probability sample with interviews conducted online. The detailed methodology statement, survey instrument, topline results, and crosstabs for this release are available at https://law.marquette.edu/poll/category/results-and-data/

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Highest highs and lowest lows: Gallup 1937-2025

Closing the books on Gallup presidential approval

When I refreshed my presidential approval database in January, I wondered when Gallup would update their measure from December. They usually release approval in mid-month, but there wasn’t an update as of Jan. 20. I assumed it would come soon.

Now we learn that there won’t be any more Gallup presidential approval polls. As reported in the Washington Post and the New York Times on Feb. 11, Gallup has decided to discontinue their approval polling. Gallup made a similar decision in 2015 to discontinue their presidential horse race polls.

This is a loss to the public. The Gallup organization has the longest running, and most voluminous, time series of approval, dating back to 1937. While their methodology has evolved over time, they have always used what was “state of the art” methods for the time, and their question wording has been stable for decades, after evolving a bit in the early years. That means when we want to make the best apples-to-apples comparison across presidents and decades, Gallup is the indispensable source.

Here is what I now realize to be my final update of all the 2846 Gallup approval polls since Roosevelt in Aug. 1937 to Trump in Dec. 2025.

There are plenty of high quality national polls available now, so Gallup is hardly the only game in town. The polling averages from Silver Bulletin, FiftyPlusOne, New York Times, RealClearPolitics and others are now widely recognized as a better way to track the full measure of approval across dozens of pollsters rather than rely on a single pollster.

When George Gallup started the poll in the 1930s there was money to be made in public opinion polling. Newspapers across the country subscribed to his polls and distributed his results to a national audience. Gallup actually offered newspapers a money back guarantee that his 1936 presidential horse race poll would outperform the Literary Digest poll that year, which it did. The poll also survived embarrassing errors, most notably the 1948 presidential election.

These days, there isn’t such a financial interest in providing opinion data to the public. Private polling for interest groups, parties and candidates remains financially viable, but those polls serve private, not public, interests. News organizations either run their own polls, contracting the work through various pollsters, or report on polls they don’t produce themselves but also don’t pay for. Universities (like my Marquette Law School Poll) produce public polls in the public interest and for the publicity value. Gallup is reported to say they are refocusing their business away from approval polling, which is sad but understandable.

This moment of closure lets us make one final list of the lows and highs of Gallup approval results over the decades.

The all time lowest low goes to Harry Truman, at 22%. John F. Kennedy has the highest low, never falling below 56%. And as for highs, George W. Bush owns that record at 90%, eclipsing his father, George H.W. Bush by one point. As for the lowest high, that belongs to the current president, at 47% in his second term, two points lower than his high in the first term. No other president has failed to reach 50% on their best days.

That all time low for Truman was misreported for some decades as a point higher, 23%. I found the discrepancy in 2006, tracked down the evidence, and presented it to Gallup’s then Editor in Chief, Frank Newport, who was gracious enough to review my results and confirm the new low of 22%. I told that story in a post in July 2006. To my surprise, the post still lives at my first website, Political Arithmetik

Presidents can tie their highs or lows in multiple polls on different days. The next table shows all the lows and highs and the dates on which those polls were taken. Some of the dates are instructive. Trump’s second term high came 7 days after his inauguration. And his first term highs were all during the early months of the Covid pandemic. Biden’s low came about the time he dropped out of the presidential race in 2024. For George W. Bush and Franklin D. Roosevelt, their highest marks came after attacks on the United States, after Sept. 11, 2001 and after Dec. 7, 1941.

As for largest range from high to low, that honor is shared by George W. Bush and Harry S Truman, both with a 65 point range, Bush from 90-25 and Truman from 87-22. (Truman lacks a middle name, just an initial, hence no period after the S, a lesson I learned from my 12th grade government teacher, Dr. Austin F. Staples. The great Google AI tells me official documents include a period, but I trust Dr. Staples on this.)

So there you have it. An end of a polling era. “Official” highs and lows will no longer have a consistent standard to use. This means as a practical problem that the highs and lows going forward will come from outliers– the rare poll with an exceptionally high approval and the exceptionally low ones. That, I think, is a loss.

Continue ReadingHighest highs and lowest lows: Gallup 1937-2025

Attention to news in 2025

What we noticed and what we ignored

Time for a look back at the news of 2025 and what the public paid attention to and what it largely ignored. The year has not lacked for news, especially political news as Donald Trump expanded his authority through executive orders, followed by litigation over those orders.

My Marquette Law School Poll asks how much people have heard or read about recent events in the news in each poll:

Here are some recent topics in the news. How much have you heard or read about each of these?

Polls are conducted every other month, six times a year. This is not a comprehensive review of news events but provides a look at how much attention the public gave to a wide variety of mostly political news. Topics are picked from recent events that have received significant coverage and raise important political issues, with more emphasis on news stories published within a few weeks of each poll’s field dates.

Figure 1 shows the 32 topics asked about over the year.

The top topic of the year, by a substantial margin, is tariffs. The May survey came a month after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of tariffs on April 2 and the subsequent changes made in rates and implementation dates. Fully 81% of U.S. adults said they had heard or read a lot about the tariffs.

The second most attention went to Trump’s plans for deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, with 70% hearing a lot about this in the first month of the administration. Subsequent items concerning immigration issues varied in visibility, with the mistaken deportation of a man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador in March ranking as the 7th most followed event, with 63% hearing a lot. When Garcia was returned to the U.S. in June, only 37% heard a lot about that, ranking 25th of 32 news items.

Cuts to the federal workforce ranked 3rd most followed story, with 67% hearing a lot as of May. Rounding out the top five news items were the war between Israel and Iran in June and the contentious meeting between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on February 28th in the Oval Office. U.S. airstrikes on nuclear facilities in Iran ranked 6th.

At the bottom of the chart are Trump’s attempts to remove a member of the Federal Reserve Board and the firing of the director of the Centers for Disease Control, followed closely by 30% and 29% respectively.

If you follow politics enough to be reading this post you will probably to shocked that attention to the November elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia ranks 31st of 32 events, with only 28% hearing a lot about this. For us political junkies, it is a reminder that much of the public doesn’t follow politics closely, and especially not elections in states other than their own.

The honor of being the least followed of the 32 stories is Trump’s extended diplomatic trip to Asia in late October, during the shutdown of the federal government, with only 24% who paid a lot of attention to that trip.

Attention to news by party

Figure 2 shows attention to these news topics by party. A higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans say they have read or heard a lot about most of the news events covered during 2025. By comparison to either party, independents are considerably less likely to have followed news across every item.

Highly visible events receive more attention across all partisan lines while more obscure events are also followed less by each party group. The correlation of attention for Democrats and Republicans is .78. Independent attention correlates with Democratic attention at .91, and with Republican attention at .85. In short, news tends to penetrate each partisan group in similar ways though with generally lower attention from Republicans and especially independents.

Republican vs Democratic attention to news

Figure 3 shows the attention gap between Republicans and Democrats across the 32 topics, arranged by size of the difference between Republican and Democratic attention. For the news items we asked about, Democrats say they have heard or read more than do Republicans for 24 items, Republicans more for 5 items and the parties are tied for 3 items.

It is notable that the items with greater attention from Republicans are closely tied to Trump. Attention to his inaugural address shows the largest Republican advantage over Democrats in attention, 27-percentage points, followed by Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress (don’t call it a State of the Union address) with an 11-point GOP lead in attention. Other topics with a Republican advantage closely concern Trump–the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas and the U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

At the opposite end of the partisan attention gap, Democrats paid much more attention to the “No Kings” protests in October, by 23-points, and to a measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the winter by 20-points. Democrats also paid substantially more attention than Republicans to the firing of the CDC director and reductions in the federal workforce.

Perhaps surprisingly, Democrats paid considerably more attention in September to the potential release of the Jeffrey Epstein files than did Republicans, by 16-points. (This does not cover the actual release of the files in December, after our final poll of 2025 in November.) Coverage of this issue has emphasized pressure from Republicans and MAGA activists for the release, though Democrats also supported the law to require the files to be made public.

This invites the question of whether Democrats simply pay more attention to politics than do Republicans.

In fact, attention to politics is virtually identical for Republicans and Democrats, while independents are much less attentive in general. We ask

Some people seem to follow what’s going on in politics most of the time, whether there’s an election going on or not. Others aren’t that interested. How often do you follow what’s going on in politics…?

Forty-nine percent of Democrats say they follow politics most of the time, as do 48% of Republicans, a trivial difference. In contrast, only 26% of independents say they follow politics most of the time. The lower attention from independents is reflected in their notably lower levels of attention to news events, but this can’t account for Republican and Democratic differences across news items. Table 1 shows attention to politics by partisanship in 2025 surveys.

One plausible explanation is that partisans follow different news sources, and those sources give different emphasis to specific news events. I don’t have data on the actual content of various news sources, but in my data there are only small (typically 3-4 point differences) in awareness of news events between Republicans who follow only conservative news sources and those who follow a mix of conservative and liberal sources, and a similarly small difference for Democrats who follow only liberal sources versus a mix of liberal and conservative sources. This casts some doubt on the idea that it is differences in content that drives differential awareness, and suggests that partisanship has more to do with what news people pay attention to, and remember. More on this in a future post.

The data tables

For those who want to see the numbers in detail here you go. Table 2 shows those who heard or read a lot, a little and nothing at all for each news event. While there is some variation, the most prominent news items have high “heard a lot” and low “nothing at all”, and the less prominent items reverse this.

Table 3 shows high attention to news by party identification.

Continue ReadingAttention to news in 2025
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