The Republican-heavy audience that tuned in to hear President Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday greeted it with tempered positivity, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
Speech-watchers broadly said Trump’s policies would take the country in the right direction, with majorities saying the same across five issue areas that were the focus of the president’s speech. But fewer expressed strong confidence in Trump to help people like them, use his presidential power responsibly or provide the nation with real leadership.
Roughly 7 in 10 speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump’s speech tonight, with a smaller 44% offering a very positive response. That’s lower than the 57% of viewers who rated Trump’s initial address to Congress very positively eight years ago, or the 51% who said the same of President Joe Biden’s initial address in 2021. It also comes just below the 48% “very positive” rating Trump saw for his 2018 State of the Union.
Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately hail from presidents’ own parties. In CNN’s speech reaction polls, which have been conducted most years dating back to the Clinton era, audience reactions have always been positive.
The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 14 percentage points more Republican than the general public.
The Trump-friendly audience reacted negatively to a protest effort from a Democratic member of Congress. Eight in 10 Americans who watched the speech said they saw Rep. Al Green’s interruption of Trump’s speech as inappropriate, with just 20% saying the representative from Texas acted appropriately. Green was ejected from the House chamber after continuing to protest following a warning from House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Roughly 6 in 10 viewers said in a poll conducted before the speech that they approved of Trump’s handling of the presidency overall. By contrast, Trump’s approval rating is underwater with the American public as a whole, a CNN poll released Sunday found, with 48% of U.S. adults approving of his performance as president and 52% disapproving.
Trump’s speech on Tuesday did little to further improve the already-positive perspectives of his audience. In a survey conducted prior to the speech, 61% said they believed his policies would move the country in the right direction; afterward, 66% of the same people said his policies would take the country down the right path. The share who believed Trump has had the right priorities so far stood at 56% prior to the speech and 59% immediately following its conclusion.
Half of speech-watchers said they held a lot of confidence in Trump to provide real leadership, while 45% said they had a lot of confidence in him to use his presidential power responsibly, and just 4 in 10 expressed high confidence in his ability to help people like them. Majorities of 65% or more said they had at least some confidence in him across each metric.
Trump scored his highest marks of the night for his policies on immigration: 76% of speech-watchers said his proposed policies on that issue would take America in the right direction, compared with closer to 6 in 10 who said the same of his proposals to change how the government works (63%), or his proposed policies on the economy (62%) or tariffs (56%). That’s a shift from CNN’s polling on his first term speeches, when he consistently rated higher on economic issues than on those related to immigration.
Most who tuned in said they thought his proposed policies on foreign affairs would move the country in the right direction (61%). Speech-watchers are also largely aligned with Trump’s approach to Ukraine and Russia. Majorities said that based on what they heard in the speech, the president’s policies toward Ukraine (63%) and Russia (58%) offered the right amount of support for each country. Sizable minorities, though, see Trump as too supportive of Russia (37%) and not supportive enough of Ukraine (33%).
Annual presidential addresses rarely lead to significant shifts in presidential approval among the broader American public, particularly in recent years. Historically, first-year addresses to Congress have tended to be better rated than later State of the Union speeches and more likely than others to result in an approval rating bounce. But Trump, the first president in the era of modern presidential polling to serve nonconsecutive terms, isn’t new to the office — and current levels of polarization may also curtail his speech’s potential to affect public opinion.
The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 431 US adults who said they watched the presidential address on Tuesday, and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the speech, and were selected by a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of speech-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.
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