What’s fresh in our minds today — and what will be top-of-mind tomorrow, next week, next month, and first Tuesday of November — will almost certainly all differ. That’s why snapshot poll numbers tend to be exaggerated, misleading, and unhelpful: Until the dust settles, the data just isn’t relevant.
Instead of focusing on polls, campaigns should focus on creating magical moments that wormhole into our psyche — those indelible images that linger forever. And in the State of the Union, at the very top of that list:
President Trump asked members of Congress to stand if they agree with his statement that the first duty of the U.S. government is to protect American citizens, not those in the country illegally.
— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 25, 2026
Trump said people who didn't stand should be "ashamed" of themselves. Some… pic.twitter.com/YIBp6QaAxS
For voters, that’s the long-term takeaway: Republicans stood for American citizens, whereas Democrats stood for illegal immigrants — and absolutely nothing else. They didn’t stand for Olympic champions, war heroes, voter ID laws, lowering the crime rate, grieving mothers, or even vulnerable children. It was a helluva contrast.
In the long-term takeaway battle, Trump won in a landslide.
Which means, if Trump’s SOTU address also succeeded in reclaiming the voters’ faith and confidence, he’d be back in the driver’s seat for the midterms. He just won by a landslide in the memorability department; if voters also have faith and confidence in his leadership, the Democrats would be caught flat on their heels.
American elections are binary decisions. Memorability, charisma, and likeability all matter, but faith and confidence are critical. Nine times out of ten, if you have more faith and confidence in one party than another, that party is going to win.
And the proxy question for faith and confidence is, “Do you believe Donald Trump is moving the country in the right direction?”
It serves as a useful proxy because it speaks to vision, trust, hope, and execution. The “which direction” question ties it all together; it’s faith and confidence by another name.
It means you trust your navigator — and you like where he’s taking you.
And that’s one of the very few things that snapshot polls do reveal: trajectory. They’re like a mile-maker along the highway.
Or, if you prefer a hockey analogy: Polls won’t tell us if our puck will score, but at least we’ll know which direction it’s moving!
My colleague and Tesla-bro, Matt Margolis, wrote an excellent breakdown of CNN’s instant post-State of the Union polling numbers. If you’re on Team MAGA, there was good news galore:
After Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address, CNN political director David Chalian broke down the network’s instant poll — and it didn’t exactly produce the outrage or “failing Trump” narrative that the left likes to see. It was the kind of segment that left-wing pundits will be scrambling to spin before breakfast.
[…]
Chalian also noted that among speech watchers, 64% “say [Trump’s] policies will move the U.S. in the right direction.”
But here’s a metric I think is really important: the change from pre-speech to post-speech. According to the poll, before the speech, 54% of speech watchers said Trump’s policies would move the United States in the right direction — a 10-point jump.
Matt is right: That’s a wonderful trajectory.
But we’d learn even more about our trajectory if we had a third set of data.
Well, well, well. It turns out that Marist polled Americans one day before the SOTU. Now, different pollsters use different methodologies, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. Their questions were also worded differently, and obviously, they sampled different audiences.
But it’s still about as close as we can get!
And one day before the SOTU, Marist reported:
55% of residents nationally say the direction in which President Trump is moving the country is change for the worse. 37% think it is change for the better. Eight percent believe President Trump is creating no real change at all.
So 37% positive, 55% negative.
Just before the SOTU, when anticipation was at its highest, 54% thought we were moving in the right direction. And then, by the time Trump’s speech was over, the number hit 64%
That’s a 27-point swing. In an age of such intense political polarization, that’s extraordinarily unusual.
As a comparison, after Joe Biden’s disastrous 2024 debate with Trump, Biden’s numbers only fluctuated by a couple of points. For the most part, voters’ political opinions — especially when it comes to President Trump — aren’t malleable. For better or worse, the president is a known commodity: His lovers love him and his haters hate him.
Which is why we’d expect Trump’s polling to be relatively consistent. After all, his approval rating never really fluctuates more than a few points.
Yet this was a 27-point swing in just a few days!
Part of the discrepancy was due to CNN’s audience being more pro-Trump than Marist’s:
The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 13 percentage points more Republican than the general public.
Trump’s speech seemed to rally some who watched it. In a survey conducted prior to the speech, 54% said they believed his policies would move the country in the right direction; afterward, 64% of the same people said his policies would take the country down the right path. The share who believed Trump has had the right priorities stood at 44% prior to the speech and 54% immediately following its conclusion.
Which means, even if you wanted to penalize Trump by 13 points, a majority of Americans — 51% — now believe Trump is moving the country in the right direction. Before the speech they didn’t; now they do.
And that’s our magic number, because American elections are binary decisions.
But we’re less interested in hard numbers and more interested in trajectory: Remember, the question we originally asked wasn’t whether the country was moving in the right direction.
It was, “Is Trump moving in the right direction?” More specifically, do Americans have faith and confidence in their president?
And the initial feedback isn’t just a resounding YES — it also suggests we’re moving quickly and making remarkable time. Because, if we’re already above 50%, it means we have the momentum.
That puck is on the move!
We already knew President Trump’s speech was memorable. Now we know it on target, too.
Editor’s Note: With President Trump back in the White House, the state of our Union is strong once again.
Support PJ Media’s coverage of the president’s State of the Union Address and help us report the truth the radical Left doesn’t want you to hear. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership. Click HERE today!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member