If you’ve ever wondered how bad a president’s State Of The Union speech is It must be that members of his own party rate it relatively low. Trump’s 2026 SOTU speech provided some answers.
Usually, viewers of State Of The Union speeches have two things going for them. Viewers follow politics and are usually also fans of the current president. That’s why it’s hard for a president to get low marks in a viewer survey after the State Of The Union address.
After each SOTU, CNN surveys speech watchers to see what they thought.
CNN Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian reported on the network’s poll results after Trump spoke:
Let me take a moment here to explain. This is a survey of speech watchers, so it’s not a survey that’s reflective of the population at large and what we know about people tuning in to State of the Union speeches. They are usually fans of the president, regardless of which president is giving the speech.
So the voting universe here is about 13 points more Republican than the overall population usually is, so keep all that in mind as we get to our instant poll results.
Get this reaction from those who watched the speech tonight. 38% indicated that they responded very positively to the speech.
25%, somewhat positive, 36% negative. So about two-thirds are in the positive area and one-third in the negative area among the speech viewers. How does that very positive number compare to previous addresses? Well, look here. It is about six percentage points lower than Donald Trump’s very positive score last year.
