June 18, 2026, 8:30 a.m. ET
- A Franklin & Marshall College poll of voters indicates President Donald Trump’s approval rating in Pennsylvania has dropped to a new low.
- Voters’ negative views on the economy and personal finances are impacting their political outlook.
- Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro maintains a strong lead over his Republican challenger for re-election.
Pennsylvania voters have bad news for President Donald Trump and the candidate he’s endorsed to lead the Keystone State, according to the latest poll from Franklin & Marshall College.
Only 29% of the 546 registered voters surveyed June 8-14 say in poll results made public June 18 that Trump is doing an excellent or good job in his second term. That’s a 10-percentage-point shift from March, when the F&M survey found Trump with 39% support.
Some 13% of respondents rated his performance as fair and 58% ranked it as poor, which is a new low for Trump in the 19 times the poll has asked Keystone State voters to rate his job performance going back to his first term in 2017.
Pa. voter sentiment heading toward midterms
Trump’s approval rating on several key issues for voters also continues to sink.
On immigration, 39% give him excellent or good marks, compared to 47% in October 2025.
On foreign policy, 29% approve of Trump’s job, compared to 42% in October 2025.
And on his handling of inflation, one of the key issues of his 2024 campaign, just 17% of voters surveyed said Trump is doing well, down from 31% in the fall of 2025.
More voters than in March said they felt worse off financially than they were a year ago (47%, compared to 36% in March), and expect to be worse off next year (32%, compared to 19%).
“The voters’ mood is pretty negative,” said Berwood A. Yost, director of both the Center for Opinion Research and the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall in Lancaster. “There’s been a sizeable movement in people’s personal financial circumstances. The Trump administration has really been taking a beating because of that.”
The shifts are notable because they reflect voter sentiment before and now after the U.S. invasion of Iran, which began Feb. 28.
“We were literally collecting data right up until the war started,” Yost said about the March survey. “Clearly the changes that have been brought by that intervention, particularly around the cost of living, you can see just how concerned people are about the economy.
“You can see how that personal financial concern continues to rise,” he continued. “It’s risen among groups that are supportive of the president and his job approval ratings have suffered.”
Voters who identified the economy as a top concern said Democrats were best suited to address the issue by 42% to 24% over Republicans, unchanged since March.
Voters also gave Democrats a 12-point edge on which party they prefer to control the U.S. House of Representatives, with the minority party leading the GOP 47% to 35%.
Critical midterm elections in November will shape the final two years of Trump’s second term. Democrats are trying to wrest control of both the House and U.S. Senate from the GOP in order to blunt the president’s agenda.
Historically, the party of the sitting president performs poorly during midterm elections as voters seek to place a check on their powers.
“Their party always suffers at the midterms, the question is how much?” Yost said. “Right now it looks like a lot.”
Pennsylvania gubernatorial race
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, continues to hold a solid lead over Republican state Treasurer Stacy Garrity in the race for governor. Shapiro leads Garrity 50% to 28%, the poll found.
Even if voters felt better about the economy and the party in power in Washington, Garrity would have an uphill battle, Yost said.
Not only is Shapiro enjoying widespread support — even a quarter of Republicans polled gave him positive approval — he appears to be immune from voters’ feelings about their personal economic situations. Shapiro’s approval remained relatively unchanged from March, dropping only 2 percentage points, from 50% to 48%, which is within the poll’s margin of error.
History is also working against Garrity.
Since Pennsylvania implemented a two-term limit on the governor’s office in 1967, voters have re-elected the incumbent governor all but once, the exception being former Gov. Tom Corbett in 2014. The incumbent, Yost noted, has won re-election by an average of 13 points over their challenger.
Yost said voters’ feelings about the economy and the Republican Party, as well as their tendency to favor incumbents, pose structural issues that Garrity can do little to change.
“She’s got to be able to drive a message that makes people feel like Shapiro isn’t doing a good job and she could be a better job,” Yost said. “She isn’t well known. She needs to get better known. She (can do that) through messaging that is effective and tells her story.”
But she’ll have to raise more money than she has to get that message out, he added.
Widespread consensus among voters on some issues
The poll underscores how there are several issues on which Pennsylvanians agree regardless of political affiliation. Some 89% of voters, for example, back a move to limit access to cell phones in schools.
Both the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania Senate and the Democratic-controlled state House have approved a bell-to-bell ban on cell phones in schools and Shapiro intends to sign the legislation into law.
The June survey also found that seven in 10 voters favor
- a state law making it illegal to discriminate in employment or housing based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Voters have consistently supported such a law since the poll began asking the question in 2014;
- regulating and taxing skill games, which is an increase from the 60% who supported it in 2024. On June 15, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court weighed in on skill games, ruling that they meet the definition of a slot machines under state laws and are therefore operating illegally. The court placed a 120-day moratorium on its decision so state lawmakers can address the issue before the ruling takes effect; and
- using an independent redistricting commission to draw state legislative districts. About 59% said they were opposed to the mid-decade redistricting that some states have done to improve their party’s chances of winning control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November.
The 546 people polled included 233 Democrats, 226 Republicans and 87 independents.
Matthew Rink is a USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania investigative journalist.
