Donald Trump’s failure to deliver on his promises and his turbulent moves in office are turning young men away from the president, according to a damning new poll.
Polling from the Speaking With American Men (SAM) project, shared with Puck, shows that Trump’s favorability rating among young males now stands at 46 percent, down from 56 percent in the spring of 2024. Among all young people, Trump’s favorability rating is an even bleaker 36 percent.
John Della Volpe, who surveyed 4,211 people aged 16–29 from Oct. 28 to Nov. 6 as part of the project, suggested that Trump’s failure to bring down costs—and his subsequent imposition of turbulent global tariffs—has eroded young people’s trust in the president.
“The big picture is that Trump was getting the benefit of the doubt in the first 100 days of his term,” Della Volpe told Puck. “Now, they are reflecting on those policies several months later and seeing no significant improvement. And they’re saying that their situation is no better. In many cases, it’s worse.”
The poll, conducted late last year, also suggests that Trump’s numbers could plummet further among young people in 2026. The year has already had a chaotic start under Trump after the U.S. launched an attack on Venezuela and abducted its former leader, Nicolás Maduro, to face “narco-terrorism” charges in New York.
Trump has since threatened to launch similar military action against several countries such as Cuba and Colombia, as well as reigniting his long-standing ambitions to take over Greenland. In a shocking official statement, the White House failed to rule out the possibility of invading the island, which is an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.
Avoiding “unnecessary wars and conflicts” is a hugely important issue for young men, with 78 percent of respondents saying it “matters” and 68 percent saying they would be more likely to support a candidate who avoids them.
Ahead of the crucial 2026 midterms, the poll also found that young men believe Democrats would be more likely to avoid foreign wars than Republicans, by a five-point margin.
As noted by Puck’s Peter Hamby, the Trump administration has been desperate to stress that the U.S. is not in an all-out war with Venezuela and that the detention of Maduro was merely a law enforcement operation.
“But when your administration forcibly extracts a foreign leader from a heavily fortified compound, killing dozens of people in the process, that might seem like a semantic difference,” Hamby wrote.
Elsewhere, the poll found that only 27 percent of young men agreed that Trump is “delivering for people” like them, while 40 percent said: “He talked big, but let people like me down.”
Just 22 percent of young men agreed that the billionaire president is “fighting for people” like them, while 47 percent said Trump “creates chaos and makes things worse.”
Responding to the poll, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast: “President Trump was overwhelmingly elected by nearly 80 million Americans to deliver on his popular and commonsense agenda. The President has already made historic progress not only in America but around the world. It is not surprising that President Trump remains the most dominant figure in American politics.”
