If you have ever questioned how bad a president’s State Of The Union address has to be for members of his own party to grade it relatively low, Trump’s 2026 SOTU address provided some answers.
Usually, viewers of State Of The Union addresses tend to be two things. Viewers follow politics, and they tend to also be fans of the current president. Therefore, it is difficult for a president to get low marks on 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 thought.
CNN Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian reported on the results of the network’s poll after Trump spoke:
I just wanna take a moment here to explain. This is a poll of speech watchers, so it is not a poll that is reflective of the population overall and what we know about people who tune in to State of the Union addresses. They tend to be fans of the president, whichever president is giving the speech.
So the polling universe here is about 13 points more Republican than the overall population usually is, so just keep all that in mind as we go to the results of our instant poll.
Get this reaction from those that watched the speech tonight. 38% said they had a very positive reaction to the speech.
25%, somewhat positive, 36% negative. So roughly two-thirds are in the positive territory, one-third negative, among speech watchers. How does that very positive number stack up against previous addresses? Well, look here. It’s about six percentage points lower than Donald Trump was at with the very positive score last year.