Gallup is discontinuing its daily tracking poll of presidential approval, the storied pollster announced Wednesday in the latest cutback of the company’s public survey operations.

Political reporters and observers have long been accustomed to visiting Gallup's website every day shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern Time for the latest update in the president's approval rating. But rather than report public opinion of President Donald Trump’s job performance on a daily basis, Gallup will now offer a weekly approval rating.


The reason for the change? Gallup had been tacking a presidential approval question onto polls it was conducting for the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index since 2008 — a continuous, privately sponsored health survey. But that poll is now transitioning from phone to mail surveys, which don't enable reporting of daily results.

“We are making this change largely because the source for these daily data, the Gallup Daily tracking program — made possible by a client-supported commitment to daily interviewing on a wide variety of well-being metrics — is shifting from telephone surveys to reporting mail surveys on a monthly basis,” Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said in the announcement.

Gallup had been conducting approximately 500 phone interviews each night, for a total of 3,500 each week. But with well-being survey shifting to the mail, Gallup is slashing the amount of phone polling by more than half.

“Gallup remains committed to tracking presidential approval using probability-based, telephone interviewing but is reducing the sample size from 3,500 to 1,500 U.S. adults per week,” Newport said, adding that rather than issuing daily releases of the new numbers, Gallup will update the results at 1 p.m. on Mondays.


Because of the smaller overall sample sizes, Gallup will no longer report detailed results by subgroup — gender, age, race, geographic region, educational attainment, income, marital status, church attendance, political ideology and party identification — on a weekly basis. Instead, those reports will be issued monthly.

POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. {{#success}} {{heading}} {{message}} {{heading}} {{message}} More Subscriptions {{message}}

The change is the latest retrenchment for Gallup, which has been the dominant name in public polling for decades. The company did not conduct any horse-race polling for the 2016 election, despite earning a reputation dating back to the 1930s for predicting presidential winners.

Gallup has data on presidential approval dating back to Harry Truman — and that will continue, even without the daily updates.

The latest weekly Gallup results show a small uptick in Trump’s approval rating. In surveys conducted over the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Trump’s approval rating was 39 percent, up from 37 percent the week prior. A 55 percent majority of voters disapproved of Trump’s performance last week, down slightly from 57 percent a week earlier.


Gallup’s announcement leaves the Republican-leaning pollster Rasmussen Reports as the only remaining public source of daily presidential approval updates. Trump last week touted his 46-percent approval rating in the Rasmussen poll — even though a 53 percent majority still disapproved of his job performance. The latest Rasmussen results on Wednesday were slightly worse for the president, with his approval rating slipping to 44 percent.