President Donald Trump's approval numbers are falling off a cliff with a voting bloc that will be essential to decide control of the midterms in 2026, according to polling expert Larry Sabato.

Sabato, a frequent critic of the president who heads the Crystal Ball political forecasting model, offered his analysis to CNN's Jessica Dean at a moment amid widespread media speculation about the precipitous decline in Democratic voter registrations — although this data showing this decline took place over the last few years of Joe Biden's presidency, making it unclear whether the trend has continued beyond President Donald Trump's victory.

The big problem for Republicans, Sabato said, is that while the registration numbers are "hard to paint as good news for Democrats," both parties still require support from independent voters to win the day — and since Trump took office, he has been collapsing with them.

"If you’ve noticed the pattern in public opinion polls, and you have to look across all the polls, not just focus on one or two or three that please you, you can see that independents have actually broken pretty substantially against Trump,” said Sabato. “They‘re the main reason why his job approval is now in the low to mid-40s. He hasn‘t been over 50 really since the very beginning of his presidency. That is the best signal of what is likely to happen in the midterm elections — job approval for the incumbent president.”

Trump can't win over these sorts of voters with partisan red-meat stunts like his takeover of D.C., Sabato continued.

“They tend to be even more focused on the economy than party registrants for Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “So they‘re looking for economic improvements. They want the prices brought down, as they were promised, and other pieces of the economy to get better. That’s good news, potentially, for Democrats, depending on what happens between now and the midterms.”

“Things aren’t as bad for Democrats as some are portraying," he added. "They’re not good either. As I said, they‘ve got a lot of work to do, but you can focus too much on the bad.”

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