Cliff Young of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal examines 3M unredacted Epstein files as Congress prepares for AG testimony, revealing Trump’s approval dropped to 42%—below historic averages—due to inflation fears from tariffs and shutdowns, not temporary wins like Maduro’s capture. Polls show 55% distrust ICE’s force, with 45% supporting deportation but rejecting current tactics, while nativism drives a 30-point partisan gap on hiring native-born workers. Foreign policy data highlights 43% max support for U.S. dominance, favoring military action only against direct threats, reflecting war-weariness. Young dismisses polling manipulation claims, noting inflation’s disproportionate impact on young, poor, and minority voters—Trump’s weakest approval blocs—while systemic secrecy in Epstein’s case fuels cross-party distrust, though affordability remains the top 2026 midterm issue. [Automatically generated summary]
For instance, Liberation Day tariffs announced, signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the government shutdown, the capture of Maduro, the shooting, the fatal shooting of Renee Goode.
Can you explain how any of those impacted President Trump's approval rating, if at all?
But ultimately, this is a sample representative of the American population by demographics, by party persuasion, Republican, Democrat, and Independent.
We do this poll online.
We go to people's doors, we knock on their doors, or we send a mail, invite in the mail, excuse me.
We bring them to the poll.
This is a gold standard we've used over the course of the last decade or the last decades.
It's very analogous to other methodologies used, and that's specifically what we did.
The trend lines here, this is the red on top is Republicans, and then independents, or sorry, total is in the middle and gray, and then the blue is Democrat.
The percent who agree that when jobs are scarce, employers should prioritize hiring people of this country over immigrants.
It has, interestingly, not really changed that much over time for Republicans, but has changed for Democrats.
We'll start with Alan Rhinelander, Wisconsin Independent Line.
Go ahead, Alan.
unidentified
Hi, good morning.
Good morning.
I wanted to talk about the student loan issue.
And this is rarely asked about, and it probably isn't reflected very well in the polls.
But there are around 37 million voters in this country who will never be able to repay their student loans.
So around 40% of these people never even graduated college, but yet they have the student loan debt to deal with.
Now, the Republicans, up to this point in Trump's term, they get an F minus on actually handling this issue in a way that serves not only their constituents, but the whole entire country.
Now, Trump knows full well.
Lyndon McMahon, they both know full well that bankruptcy rights have got to be returned to these predatory loans.
Trump knows about bankruptcy.
Lyndon McMahon knows full well personally about bankruptcy.
Now, some smart Republicans like Ron DeSantis, they're calling for the return of bankruptcy with a clawback from the colleges.
And I think that's completely appropriate.
But, you know, that idea is getting nowhere within the party because, quite frankly, I think it's been captured by the elites, by the colleges, by the lending industry, and by local forces who are profiting wildly on this failed loan scam.
So here's your chart on if the 2026 congressional elections were held today, which of the following would be the single most important factor for you in deciding who to vote for?
Cost of living by far was the top as far as total goes, but for Democrats, it was protecting democracy and democratic norms.
Yeah, once again, cost of living or affordability is a critical issue.
In our mind, that will be the issue that defines the midterms this year.
But, you know, threats to democracy, worries about norms is a Democratic issue.
It's especially an issue among the more educated.
It's important to emphasize that point.
That's one of the Achilles' heels, in my opinion, of the Democratic Party, is that because they're top-heavy with educated people, they're worried about issues that aren't necessarily the focal point of the average American.
I think we're going to have a force kind of drawing parties and politicians to the center, to the average voter, which is focused on affordability.
But we can understand the breakdown of priorities that way.
The last point I was going to make is Republicans, while they're worried about cost of living, are also worried about immigration.
Obviously, immigration is a critical issue, especially for their base.
Don, in Mantua Township, New Jersey, Independent Line, you're on the air, Don.
unidentified
Yes.
Do you think that with this Trump's antics criticizing the halftime show of the Super Bowl and trying to build a memorial arch in his name, the other silly things that he has done, renaming the Kennedy Center?
And I think he's jeopardized the Republican Party and has put them in a position now that they are not only going to lose the House, but they're also going to lose the Senate.
And if that happens, I think his presidency is over.
So would you vote for the Democrat or the Republican?
And you can see those lines are, as time goes on over the course of the year, those lines are starting to separate with Democrats on top at 47.7%, Republicans at 42.5%.
I just, I had a comment on a lot of the polls being like, the guest is saying it's like nativism, nativism, nativism, and that nativism isn't like racism.
And I just, I need white people to admit, like, whether it's the Super Bowl halftime show or white Americans' views on immigration or like when they say, I don't recognize the country that I live in right now, like I just need them to admit, like, they're scared because they're white.
Okay.
And they're afraid of anything or anybody that doesn't look like them or talk like them.
This country is on pace to become a majority minority for the first time in its history around like 2050.
And white people see their power dwindling.
So they're doing everything they can from the White House to the local city's mayor's office.
They're doing everything they can to re-entrench their power.
And I just need white people all around the country to admit that because that's where the healing is going to start.
We cannot fix this until we acknowledge the root of what it is.
And it's a critical point of the debate of what's going on, those social forces that are shaping our world and more specifically our politics.
In the book, we talk about these long-term trends.
We talk about the changing racial composition.
But when you put all these factors together, it's nativism that basically swamps out all the other explanations.
That's not to say that racism isn't there.
That's not to say that authoritarianism isn't there.
It's not to say that populism isn't there.
But it's ultimately about nativism.
And I think that's critically important because the policy levers we have at our disposal to address the issue of nativism or more specifically immigration are more concrete.
We can come across and we can come to consensus on some sort of broad-based plan.
I already talked about the fact that Americans are nuanced on that.
Yes, there's racism.
There's always been racism here.
Racism has always been an element of our politics, not just today, but over the course of our history.
But when we understand the politics and the dynamics today, it's really about politics of belonging, who is an American, who isn't, who should belong to Club America and who should not.
Italian immigrants weren't, the Irish weren't considered white.
And I think our book goes through the history of nativism in the 1840s, in the 1890s, and the 1910s.
And each of those times, there was some sort of consensus on a modification in respect to immigration, because immigration does change the composition of a population.
It does threaten certain groups over others.
It is highly traumatic to a society.
And again, I think if we, yes, racism is there, but if we focus on that, we're missing the bigger picture.
And the bigger picture has a solution, which would be a comprehensive consensus on the issue of immigration.
And we have about the right, we have about the equal number of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents always in our sample.
America today is about one-third, one-third, one-third.
I think it's important to understand that a poll of a thousand is out of a thousand over 330 million people, or a little bit less if you think of adults.
It's not sort of surprising that he's never been polled.
But if you've ever gotten a call on a cell phone and he's thought it was spam, it might be one of us pollsters.
So maybe we called him and he decided not to respond.
If he didn't respond, someone else like him probably responded.
So my concern is: you know, when are we going to stop talking and dancing around the lack of affordability in this country, remove our focus on other countries, and funnel our focus on improving the lives of everyday Americans?
They'll be selecting their rep. They'll be selecting their senator based upon those issues, based upon the issues of affordability.
I agree there's lots of noise out there, but when you poll after poll after poll, suggest that bread and butter issues are the driving issues of the day.
And if political actors, politicians, governments don't understand that, they'll be penalized on Election Day.
I want to ask you about consumer confidence in the U.S.
And I'll play you from a hearing last week.
This is Senator Pete Ricketts, a Republican of Nebraska, who asked Treasury Secretary Besant about what the Senate can do to help improve and raise low consumer confidence numbers.
Yet, despite all this progress, we're seeing consumer confidence is not really rebounding the way that the economy seems to be.
In your opinion, what more can we in the Senate be doing with regard to consumer confidence and making, you know, obviously we had 40-year high inflation under the Biden administration, but what more can we be doing in the Senate to be able to help out with confidence of consumers?
Other than telling consumers to turn off MSNBC, a large part of it is a survey problem where Democrats vote very low, Republicans are more realistic, and then we end up what we're seeing.
My question for the gentleman is the way they select for the poll.
But the thing is, you know, I would ask them if the Democrats had won the election, would we have another five or ten million people in the country that are illegal?
I think the people and the way they, I don't think they're asking that on the poll.
So, you know, that's the way I feel.
And I don't have too much faith in the polls because they can be, you know, very selective.
Well, I think he reflects an underlying attitude here in the United States, but around the world, that the system is broken and no longer functions.
You know, parties and politicians don't care about the average person.
Institutions like the Institution of Polling and Pulsters can't be trusted.
I think that's kind of reflected in what the gentleman was referring to.
But we ask a lot of different questions, not just on one poll, but across the board.
And definitely, Republicans are very worried about immigration.
They believe, there's a strong belief that there are way more illegal immigrants here than the estimates suggest.
That's what's driving ultimately the worry and the politics of nativism ultimately.
And I think the polls reflect that very clearly.
It's just not that all Americans and all the people that the gentleman knows, like they might be worried about the issue, but not all Americans are worried about that specific issue.
I wanted to ask a question to the professional there.
Most of our country, we look at either C, or we either look at C-SPAN or we look at CNN or we look at Fox to get our news or MSNBC or NewsMex.
I would like to know if there is any kind of research that can tell us how much inflammatory or derogatory words are used in the course of a 24-hour, 48-hour sequence on Fox versus CNN.
Because if we keep using these words towards one another, we are only going to be enemies towards one another, and our country will never be united as we should be.
So my question, if I didn't make it clear, is there any research that will suggest or has any numbers that says Fox uses the inflammatory or derogatory words this many times or CNN uses this many inflammatory derogatory words towards Fox viewers or vice versa towards the CNN news?
And I'm going to hang up and I want to hear his response on that one.
Yeah, I don't have the data specifically, but obviously, depending on the news agency and news source you go to, they're going to have biased frames, meaning they're going to look at the issue differently.
And from one angle, you might look at immigration from a human rights standpoint or a race standpoint.
From another source, you might look at it in terms of, you know, are we following the law or not?
I think that the guest used, cite a list of different news agencies.
The older of us, which I include myself, we watch those.
The young don't at all.
They're going to be getting those clips on social media on TikTok or Instagram or X. They'll be watching their favorite podcasts or podcasters.
That's where they're getting their information.
So the information ecosystem is extremely eclectic and heterogeneous at this point.
And it's hard to sort of nail it down simply between saying we have the foxes on the one hand and the MSNOWs on the other.
So one was about the U.S. policy of dominating affairs in the Western Hemisphere and if people agreed that they should have, that the United States should have that policy.
On the independent line in Virginia, Tom, you're on with Cliff Young.
unidentified
Thank you.
general question about polling.
Mr. Young mentioned that they use landline telephone to poll people.
And my question is, do they consider that there's a certain type of person that will answer a ringing phone at their home at a number they don't recognize and another person that never picks it up.
And obviously we use a broad poolbox of ways of getting at people.
So some of the polls might be landline together with mobile, together with online, sometimes even mail, snail mail.
It's important to emphasize that Pew did a study a few years ago that suggests that never before has a polling industry used such a diverse set of methodologies when capturing the opinion of people.
And yeah, so we're in a highly complicated era where Americans are using a variety of ways to get their information to communicate, and pollsters in order to represent the population must align with that.
It might be a soft invitation where we ask you to go to a website and do it.
It might be a hard invitation where we have the link itself.
Yeah, so there are issues.
Obviously, people are always worried about spam and sort of scammers and all these sorts of things.
So we have to deal in this sort of very complicated ecosystem today, but it isn't an effective, it is an effective solution.
By the way, we're not doing a poll all one way or the other.
I think that, once again, just emphasizing the point, we're using all these methodologies together to get an accurate and robust picture of the American population.
I specifically remember during the election cycle, it cost me almost $90.
I went to the store before the winter freeze came in.
Eggs were $1 a dozen, extra large brown eggs.
Regular lunch meat was $4.99.
All the cheeses were, none of them were over $5.
Sure, some things have gone up.
I'm not buying French champagne.
You know, I don't drink champagne anyway.
You know, I'm not buying caviar from the European Union.
You know, I'm buying the staples that are here.
And I see prices relatively stable.
Now, my coffee did go up a dollar a pound.
I'll admit that.
But when it comes to the polls, it seems like they're cited out there and there's no reference number to it.
You know, I do participate in YouGov polls.
That's a genuine email.
And I do say them cited as a source.
But all these other ones say that talk about doom and gloom, there's no source listed.
And I used to get phone surveys, probably two or three a quarter.
I haven't gotten one phone survey.
And the answering machine picks up the calls that I don't get.
And there hasn't been a survey to a conservative Republican.
It seems like the questions are skewed for the liberal Democrats.
And if you call 2 million liberal Democrats compared to 100,000 Republicans, you're going to get the voices that you want and the answers that you want.
They're too selective, some of these polls, with their group that they participate with.
And as far as the polls on social media, we all know you can do a social media poll four, five, even ten times.
And with AI, it's absolutely ridiculous how you can load the answers to these questions, simply make an account with one little letter different in your name.
So I don't have any faith in these polls.
I didn't have faith in the polls in 2016 when Donald Trump won.
I didn't have faith in the polls in 2024 when Donald Trump won.
And we won't even get into the 22 election debacle that happened.
I mean, like, once again, it just reinforces or goes into this notion that the system is broken.
There's widespread systemic distrust and pollsters were seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution.
But there's no cabal of pollsters.
We're not trying to sort of manipulate as an industry the numbers to ultimately hurt the Republicans and help the Democrats, or vice versa, by the way.
We do as good a job as we can.
It's in a difficult environment where people are using all these means.
I think we do a fairly good job if you look at the historic record.
And ultimately, the point about the cost of gasoline, you know, there's some evidence suggests that Trump should be lower in the polls, but if it were not for the gas being lower, right?
The price of gas being lower, there's some good analysis out there that suggests that.
So it's not like the consumer isn't sensitive, but we have to understand that inflation in the cost of living is a regressive tax.
It affects the poor the most.
It affects the young the most.
And where do we have the most negative numbers when it comes to Trump and his administration?
Among minorities, among the poor, among the young.
You know, the last few we've done is just looking at relative interest and more specifically whether people believe that there's a collusion among elites.
Americans want disclosure.
Americans believe that elites are working together to keep that from the American people.
There's not a lot of difference across parties.
I think there is strong majorities across parties.
Obviously, there's some variability depending on how you ask the question.
I think it just reinforces, once again, this notion that the system is broken, doesn't work.
The elites have rigged the system.
It goes to frustration and systemic distrust.
I think it diverts the focus of the administration and Republicans away from the critical issue, which is once again affordability.
Here's a look at our live coverage today on the C-SPAN networks.
At 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, the House convenes and will consider legislation that would declassify less-than-lethal weapons like new taser devices as firearms under federal law.
On C-SPAN too, at the same time, the Senate gavels in and is expected to begin work on a continuing resolution to fund the Homeland Security Department to avoid a partial shutdown on Friday.
Many congressional Democrats have said they will not fund the department without reforms to immigration enforcement, such as wearing body cameras or removing masks from agents.
Immigration enforcement would not be impacted because the Republican Reconciliation Package passed over the summer pre-funded it.
But other agencies such as TSA, FEMA, and the Secret Service could experience a lapse in funding.
And on C-SPAN 3, also at 10, leaders of immigration and customs enforcement, customs and border protection, and citizenship and immigration services will testify before a House committee on the practices of their agencies after federal officers killed two Americans protesting in Minnesota last month.
You can also watch live coverage of these events on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries talked about the deposition of Ghulane Maxwell over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
During his nearly half-hour of remarks, the minority leader also discusses the upcoming funding deadline for the Department of Homeland Security after Congress passed a spending package that left out money for the agency.