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Fact check: What was the average approval rating of US presidents during their first term?

Checked on October 18, 2025

Executive summary — direct answer up front: The provided materials do not contain a verifiable, quantified answer for the historical average approval rating of U.S. presidents during their first term; instead, the documents focus on contemporary polling about Donald Trump and on midterm dynamics rather than a cross-presidential first-term mean. A defensible numeric average cannot be extracted from the supplied sources; resolving the question requires consulting comprehensive historical polling compilations such as Gallup’s presidential approval archives or aggregated datasets from polling analysts (none of which appear in the supplied analyses). The rest of this report explains what the supplied items do say, where they diverge, and what is missing for a firm conclusion.

1. What the reviewers claim — the evidence that’s missing and why it matters

All three sets of supplied analyses converge on the same core limitation: none of the provided excerpts or meta-analyses report a historic first-term average approval rating for U.S. presidents. The documents instead emphasize contemporary snapshots of approval (not cross-presidential aggregates), with repeated focus on Donald Trump’s approvals and on links between presidential popularity and midterm seat losses [1] [2] [3]. This absence matters because calculating a meaningful average requires consistent polling series across presidencies, an explicit definition of the timeframe (first 4 years, calendar vs. term-month averages), and an agreed methodology for weighting early vs. late-term polls — none of which are present in the supplied items.

2. How the supplied sources tilt the narrative — heavy attention to one president

The supplied analyses repeatedly focus on Donald Trump’s approval ratings and recent political events, producing a narrow evidentiary base for generalization [2] [4] [5]. That concentration creates an availability bias in which intensive, recent polling about a single president is mistaken for general presidential behavior across history. The documents sometimes treat Trump’s figures as representative without offering comparative data from prior administrations, leaving readers without the cross-presidential context necessary to compute or interpret a long-run first-term average [2] [4].

3. Conflicting themes: approval as snapshot versus approval as predictor

One set of documents frames approval as an immediate snapshot of a president’s standing, emphasizing current poll numbers and issue-specific ratings; another treats approval as a predictor of midterm performance and legislative consequences [3] [5]. These are different analytical uses of approval ratings: snapshots answer “how popular is X now,” while predictive frameworks investigate correlations between approval levels and political outcomes. The supplied materials mix both approaches without reconciling methodological differences, so they cannot jointly produce a single, authoritative historical average for first-term approval.

4. Dates and recency: all materials target 2025–2026 contexts, limiting historical reach

The published dates in the supplied analyses fall in the 2025–2026 window and focus on immediate political developments in that period (p1_s2 2025-09-23; [6] 2025-11-18; [3] 2026-01-01). This recency is useful for contemporary analysis but insufficient for a historical aggregate that requires polling series back to the Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy eras. Because these items are narrowly time-stamped and topical, they cannot substitute for datasets that systematically compile presidential approval ratings across administrations.

5. What the documents do offer that’s useful for researchers

Although none deliver the requested average, the materials do provide two usable clues: a consistent emphasis on the methodological importance of time windows (early-term vs. late-term) and the observed relationship between approval and midterm outcomes [3]. Those emphases highlight the key design choices a researcher must make when calculating a first-term average: define the temporal window, select consistent polling sources, and state whether the metric is a simple arithmetic mean of all polls or a weighted/rolling average. The supplied analyses implicitly identify these as necessary steps without providing the data to execute them.

6. Recommended next steps to obtain a reliable answer

To produce a defensible numeric average of first-term presidential approval, one must access comprehensive historical archives and state methodological choices explicitly: which presidents to include, whether to include partial-term presidents, and how to weight polls. The supplied documents do not supply those archives, so consult historical polling repositories and academic compilations that record Gallup and other national tracking series across administrations. The procedural guidance implicit in the supplied items—define window, standardize sources, disclose weighting—is crucial to avoid introducing bias when computing the long-run average [1] [4].

7. Final synthesis — what we can assert from the materials and what remains unresolved

From the supplied analyses we can confidently state that there is no contained numeric answer to “average approval rating during first presidential terms” and that the materials prioritize recent, president-specific polling over historical aggregation [1] [2] [5]. What remains unresolved—and cannot be resolved with the current documents—is the actual numeric average and its sensitivity to definitional choices. Producing that figure requires external historical polling datasets and explicit methodological choices; the supplied materials identify relevant considerations but stop short of delivering the data needed for a definitive calculation.

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