One of the first major polls to look at how Americans think President Donald Trump is handling gun policy early on in his second term found mixed results.
On the one hand, more registered voters disapproved of how Trump is approaching the issue than approved. On the other hand, they gave him higher marks on guns than on most other issues.
Overall, 44 percent told Fox News he was doing a bad job with guns so far, while 41 percent said the opposite, and 15 percent said they were unsure. Trump won over 75 percent of Republican voters on the issue and lost 74 percent of Democrats. Independents swung against Trump’s handling of gun policy by 20 points, with 48 percent disapproving and just 28 percent approving.
The poll is the first significant measure of how popular Trump’s handling of gun policy has been through his first three months in office. It suggests the issue, like the man, remains highly polarizing. It also shows guns are the issue voters have made up their mind on Trump the least, possibly because he’s taken a less aggressive approach on the issue than many of the others.
The poll paints a fairly grim picture for President Trump fewer than 100 days into his second term. Border security is the only issue of the eight polled where a majority of voters approve of what he’s doing. Immigration gets higher marks than guns, but voters still disapprove of what he’s doing there by a slim margin.
His overall approval rating is eleven points underwater, with 55 percent disapproving and 44 percent approving. Still, that actually puts him on better footing overall than on gun policy in particular. That’s something he shares in common with Former President Joe Biden, who consistently performed worse on guns than he did overall–even as his popularity tanked in the latter stretch of his tenure.
Biden’s floor was far lower than the 41 percent approval Trump currently enjoys, though. By March of 2024, a poll from Yougov and The Economist put his approval on guns all the way down at 29 percent.
Trump also fared worse at points in his first term. While three of the four Fox polls to track his gun approval had it sitting between 40 and 42 percent, the one the outlet did in September 2019 found just 35 percent approved of Trump’s handling of guns and 56 percent disapproved. Americans were also more convinced about how they felt Trump was doing during his first four years, with the “don’t know” response never climbing above nine percent in Fox’s polling.
Voters in the latest poll also gave Trump higher marks on guns than they did on foreign policy, the economy, taxes, tariffs, and inflation. Fewer voters were unsure about those issues than they were about guns, too, with none of the others garnering double-digit “don’t know” responses.
Fox hired Democratic pollster Beacon Research and Republican pollster Shaw & Company Research to conduct the survey, a common tactic to avoid partisan missampling. They interviewed 1,104 randomly selected registered voters from across the country using a voter file as a guide. 830 of those interviews were done over the phone, with the remaining 274 done online through a link provided via text message. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
