The 10 Most Unpopular Presidents Heading Into a Midterm - And What Happened Next

With the November 2026 midterms about 15 weeks away, President Trump's approval rating sits in the high 30s to low 40s depending on which aggregator you trust - Silver Bulletin has his net approval at roughly -17, and several individual polls (AP-NORC, NYT/Siena) have put his topline approval at 37%. That is deep in the historical danger zone, and it got me wondering: what actually happens when a genuinely unpopular president runs into a midterm election?

The answer, it turns out, is measurable. Gallup has been asking Americans the same approval question since the 1930s, and we have official seat counts for every midterm since. So we pulled the 10 lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded heading into a midterm election - the final Gallup reading before each election day - and lined them up against what happened to the president's party in the House and the Senate.

The average result across our ten: a loss of 32.6 House seats and 4.2 Senate seats. But the individual stories range from a 63-seat catastrophe to a president who lost just 9 House seats and actually gained a Senate seat at 40% approval. This is the full scorecard.

How are we measuring "unpopular"?

Our metric is the final Gallup job approval reading taken before each midterm election day, as compiled by the American Presidency Project. Gallup is the only pollster with a continuous series back to the 1940s, which is why it is the standard for this kind of comparison. Where two presidents tie on the final reading, we rank the one whose fall campaign low was worse ahead of the other.

Two things worth flagging. First, this ranks president-midterm pairings, not presidents - so Truman and Obama each appear twice, because each man dragged a sub-46% rating into two different midterms. Second, a couple of these are second-term midterms (Bush 2006, Obama 2014, Truman 1950). Dave asked for the first half of the term, and that is what a midterm is: the two-year mark of whichever term the president is serving.

A note on the rankings

The list is ordered strictly by the final pre-election approval number, lowest first. That produces some surprises: the biggest House loss on the list (Obama's -63 in 2010) sits at #10, because Obama's 45% was merely bad rather than catastrophic. And the most famous midterm wipeout of the modern era - Clinton 1994 - does not make the list at all, because Clinton's final reading was 48%. He gets his own section below. Now the countdown.

1Harry S. Truman, 1946

Nothing in eighty years of polling has matched it. Harry Truman, eighteen months into the presidency he inherited when FDR died, went into the 1946 midterms with a 27% approval rating in Gallup's final pre-election reading. He had been at 87% in the summer of 1945. The collapse - roughly 60 points in about 16 months - remains the fastest destruction of political capital ever measured.

The causes were almost entirely domestic: a wave of massive postwar strikes (including a national railroad strike Truman threatened to break by drafting the strikers into the Army), meat shortages, and a chaotic on-again-off-again unwinding of wartime price controls. The Republican slogan that year was two words long: "Had Enough?"

The voters had. Democrats lost 54 House seats and 12 Senate seats, and Republicans took unified control of Congress for the first time since 1928. Arkansas Senator William Fulbright - a Democrat - publicly suggested Truman should appoint a Republican Secretary of State and resign, so the opposition could govern outright.

2George W. Bush, 2006

By November 2006 the Iraq War was in its bloodiest phase, Hurricane Katrina's aftermath was still fresh, and the Mark Foley congressional page scandal had detonated six weeks before the election. Bush's final pre-election Gallup readings bounced between 37% and 44% through the fall, closing at 37% - at the time, the lowest for any president before a midterm since Truman in 1950.

Democrats gained 30 House seats and 6 Senate seats, taking both chambers. Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House. Bush called it a "thumping", which was candid by presidential standards, and announced Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as Defense Secretary the very next day.

3Joe Biden, 2022

Here is the entry that breaks the model. Biden went into November 2022 with numbers as bad as anyone on this list except Truman '46 and Bush '06 - a 40% final reading, with a summer low of 38%. Inflation was running above 8%. The historical pattern said Democrats should lose 35 to 45 House seats. Every red-wave prediction market agreed.

Democrats lost 9 House seats. They gained a Senate seat. It was, by seat count, the best midterm performance by a president's party since 2002, delivered by one of the least popular presidents ever to contest one.

What happened? Three things, mostly. The Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in June 2022 put abortion on the ballot and supercharged Democratic turnout. A number of weak Republican nominees lost extremely winnable Senate and House races. And Democrats simply did not have much left to lose - their 222-seat majority was already lean, with few overextended districts to surrender.

4Barack Obama, 2014

Obama's second midterm gets forgotten because his first one was so spectacular, but by the raw approval number 2014 was actually the worse environment - a 41% final reading versus 45% in 2010. The botched healthcare.gov rollout, the rise of ISIS, and general sixth-year fatigue had ground his numbers down.

The House loss looks mild at -13, but that is the exposure effect in reverse: Democrats only held 201 seats going in, having already been strip-mined in 2010. The real damage was in the Senate, where Democrats lost 9 seats and control of the chamber. Mitch McConnell became Majority Leader, and the blockade of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination sixteen months later flowed directly from this election.

5Harry S. Truman, 1950

Truman is the only president to appear twice in the bottom five. Four months into the Korean War, with Senator Joseph McCarthy's "communists in the State Department" campaign at full volume, Truman's approval had cratered again - down to 35% in September before recovering slightly to 41% by late October.

Democrats lost 29 House seats and 6 Senate seats (among the casualties, notably, was the Senate seat Richard Nixon won in California by branding his opponent "the Pink Lady"). Democrats technically kept both chambers, but the working majority was gone - the conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats controlled the floor for the rest of Truman's presidency. By early 1952 his approval touched 22%, the lowest Gallup ever measured for any president, and he declined to seek another term.

6Ronald Reagan, 1982

People remember Reagan as a colossus, so it always surprises them that his first midterm was fought at 42% approval - in the teeth of the worst recession between the Depression and 2008. Unemployment on election day 1982 was 10.8%, the highest of the entire postwar era.

Republicans lost 26 House seats, wiping out most of the freshman class the 1980 landslide had carried in. But the Senate map was kind: the GOP actually netted +1 and kept the chamber, making Reagan one of only two presidents on this list to gain Senate seats while deeply underwater. Two years later, with the recovery roaring, he carried 49 states. If Truman 1946-48 is the comeback template, Reagan 1982-84 is the proof it can be repeated.

7Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966

LBJ's 1964 landslide had delivered Democrats 295 House seats - the biggest majority any president on this list took into a midterm. Two years of Vietnam escalation, urban riots, and inflation anxiety later, his approval had slid from the low 60s to 44%, and the voters took 47 of those House seats back.

Democrats still held Congress comfortably on paper, but the Great Society legislative machine was finished - the incoming Republicans and conservative Democrats had the votes to stall everything. The 1966 freshman class also included a resurgent Ronald Reagan winning the California governorship by a million votes. Sixteen months later, LBJ announced he would not seek re-election.

8Donald Trump, 2018

Trump's first midterm is the strangest split decision on the list. His approval spent the entire cycle pinned in a historically narrow band - never above the mid-40s, dipping to 39% in early September, closing at 44%. The result was a genuine blue wave in the House: Republicans lost 40 seats and the majority, ending unified GOP control and setting up two impeachments.

And yet the same night, Republicans gained two Senate seats - because the 2018 Senate map was the most lopsided in modern history, with Democrats defending 26 seats (including ten in states Trump had carried) against just 9 for the GOP. It is the cleanest demonstration in the dataset that the House hears the national mood while the Senate hears the map.

9Jimmy Carter, 1978

Carter's 1978 is the quiet overachievement of the pre-Dobbs era. With inflation climbing and his approval wobbling between 43% and 49% all fall, Democrats escaped with a loss of just 15 House seats and 3 Senate seats - for four decades the smallest House loss ever recorded by a president under 50%.

Partly this was because Democrats' 292-seat majority was so concentrated in safe districts, and partly because the real anger had not yet arrived - the oil shock, the hostage crisis and 13% inflation were all 1979-80 events. The reckoning simply came two years late: in 1980 Carter lost 44 states and dragged 33 House Democrats and 12 senators down with him, handing Republicans the Senate for the first time since 1954.

10Barack Obama, 2010

The biggest single midterm loss since 1938 sits at the bottom of the approval ranking - and that is the whole point of ranking it this way. Obama's 45% was the best number on this list, and he suffered the worst result: 63 House seats gone, the largest wipeout of the postwar era, in the Tea Party wave that followed the financial crisis, the stimulus, and the passage of Obamacare.

The explanation is exposure. Democrats went in holding 257 seats - dozens of them in districts John McCain had carried - after back-to-back wave elections in 2006 and 2008. When 9.5% unemployment met that overextended map, the correction was violent. Obama called it a "shellacking" at his next-day press conference. Democrats also lost 6 Senate seats and, crucially, roughly 700 state legislative seats on the eve of redistricting - a down-ballot disaster whose gerrymandered consequences lasted the whole decade.

The three that missed the list - and why they matter

Bill Clinton, 1994 (48% approval, -52 House, -8 Senate). The Republican Revolution - the most famous midterm rout of the modern era - was inflicted on a president whose final Gallup reading was a merely-mediocre 48%. Newt Gingrich's nationalized campaign, the Contract with America, and 40 years of pent-up realignment in the South did what pure unpopularity usually does. Clinton missing this list is the strongest evidence that approval is the biggest single factor, but never the only one.

Dwight Eisenhower, 1958 (57% approval, -48 House, -13 Senate). The reverse lesson. Ike was genuinely popular and his party got obliterated anyway - a sharp recession, the Sputnik shock, and a scandal around his chief of staff cost Republicans 48 House seats and a staggering 13 in the Senate, still the largest Senate loss of the era. Popularity is no vaccine.

Gerald Ford, 1974 (Ford at roughly 50-53% that fall; Nixon had been at 24% when he resigned in August). The Watergate midterm does not fit the methodology - the unpopular president resigned three months before election day - but the voters punished his party as if he were still there: -48 House, -5 Senate, the class of "Watergate Babies" that reshaped Congress. Ford's own approval had been 71% until he pardoned Nixon, after which it fell 20 points in weeks.

So what does this say about November 2026?

Trump enters the 2026 cycle polling in the same neighborhood as the top of this list. The mid-July aggregator picture: Silver Bulletin has him at roughly -17 net approval (improved from a May low of about -20), FiftyPlusOne's weighted average reads 37.1% approve / 58.9% disapprove, and individual polls from AP-NORC and NYT/Siena have printed 37%. One wrinkle for the historical comparison - Gallup, whose numbers anchor this entire article, wound down its 80-year presidential approval series earlier this year, so the aggregator averages now carry the load.

If the final pre-election picture stays in the 37-41% range, Trump would slot in somewhere between #2 and #5 on this list. The historical average for that neighborhood is a loss of 30-45 House seats - and Republicans are defending a majority so thin that a loss of a half-dozen seats flips the chamber.

But 2022 is the reason nobody should treat that as a forecast. Biden sat at 40% and lost 9 seats. The same three questions that decided 2022 will decide 2026: Is there a turnout-driving issue that cuts against the national mood? How exposed is the majority party's map? And do the challengers nominate candidates who can actually win? Approval sets the stage. It has never once delivered the lines.

What do all 10 have in common?

The penalty is real and it is large. Our ten averaged -32.6 House seats and -4.2 Senate seats, right in line with Gallup's long-run finding that sub-50% presidents lose 37 House seats on average versus 14 for presidents above 50%. Six of the ten lost at least one chamber outright.

Exposure decides the magnitude. The three biggest House losses on the list (Obama -63, Truman -54, LBJ -47) all belonged to presidents defending huge majorities of 244 seats or more. The three smallest (Biden -9, Obama '14 -13, Carter -15) came from parties holding 222 or fewer, or already in the minority. Unpopularity supplies the wind; the number of overextended seats determines how much can actually blow over.

The Senate hears a different election. Two of our ten presidents gained Senate seats while badly underwater (Reagan +1 in 1982, Trump +2 in 2018), purely because the third of the Senate on the ballot happened to favor them. The House is a national referendum; the Senate is a map.

An awful midterm predicts nothing about re-election. Truman (27%) won in 1948. Reagan (42%) won 49 states in 1984. Obama (45%) and Clinton (48%) both won comfortable second terms. Of the presidents on this list who sought re-election two years after their midterm drubbing, most won. The midterm penalty is a fine, not a sentence.