If you have already asked questions how bad a president’s State of the Union address is It must be up to members of his own party to rate him relatively low, Trump’s 2026 SOTU speech provided some answers.
Usually, viewers of State of the Union addresses tend to be one of two things. Viewers follow politics and also tend to be fans of the current president. Therefore, it is difficult for a president to get poor ratings in a viewer poll after the State of the Union address.
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After each SOTU, CNN conducts a poll of speech watchers to see what they think.
CNN’s Washington bureau chief, David Chalian, reported on the network’s poll results after Trump’s speech:
I just want to take a moment here to explain. This is a poll of speech watchers, so it is not a poll that reflects the population as a whole and what we know about the people who listen to State of the Union addresses. They tend to be fans of the president, regardless of who is giving the speech.
So the polling universe here is about 13 points more Republican than the overall population usually is, so keep all that in mind as we look at our snap poll results.
Get this reaction from those who watched the speech tonight. 38% said they had a very positive reaction to the speech.
25%, rather positive, 36% negative. Thus, about two thirds are in positive territory, and one third in negative territory, among discourse observers. How does this very positive figure compare to previous addresses? Well, look here. That’s about six percentage points less than Donald Trump’s very positive score last year.