Everything government, Parliament, the statistical agencies and the major policy institutes published — read, summarised and ranked so you can skim the day in a minute.
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Shows Donald Trump’s current approval at about 30% with 68% disapproving; notably, 31% of his 2024 voters now disapprove of his job performance, marking a substantial drop in approval during his second term.
Among voters surveyed, 44% say their congressional vote this year is a vote against Donald Trump, while 19% say it is a vote for him, indicating opposition to Trump is a larger motivating factor than support.
Forty-four percent of Americans experienced difficulty affording a basic necessity in the past year, with the burden concentrated among lower-income adults, highlighting widespread cost-of-living pressures.
Since 2019 an increasing share of Americans who say inequality is too high now believe the economic system must be completely rebuilt, reflecting a shift toward more systemic views of inequality and its remedies.
Pew’s survey research shows most online communities are not centred on politics, and a majority of members say political discussion should generally be kept out of the communities they visit most.
Finds that rising costs of household essentials are the principal economic worry for most Americans, mirroring concerns from four years earlier ahead of the last midterm election.
Reports that 84% of registered voters say the economy is very important to their midterm vote; while the economy tops issues for all voters, Republicans and Democrats differ on the salience of other issues.
About half of US adults report never using chatbots; non-users most commonly cite disinterest, privacy worries and concerns about accuracy as the main reasons for avoiding them.
Most Americans discuss news privately online (via messaging or private groups), while only about a quarter publish news-related posts publicly on social platforms, according to Pew’s analysis of online news engagement behaviours.
A Pew-Knight Initiative survey finds about one in three US adults have ever left an online community, based on data from the American Trends Panel conducted in May; the release explores motivations and prevalence of departures.
Describes Wave 198 of Pew’s American Trends Panel: a nationally representative survey conducted 24–30 August 2026, with 5,166 responses from 5,602 sampled panelists, and details on weighting and fieldwork.
Global public‑opinion polling finds widespread concern that social media harms democracy by spreading rumours; accompanying survey highlights anxieties about AI, job losses, and inequality in some countries.
About 38–39% of US adults belong to an online community such as Facebook groups, gaming communities or Reddit fandom forums, which function as virtual ‘third spaces’ for social connection and shared interest.
In a multinational poll, 85% of French adults say their national economy is doing badly — the highest share among 18 high‑income countries included in the survey.
Public opinion polling summarises US religious groups’ midterm voting preferences, noting differences between denominations — for example, Catholics leaning three points towards Democratic House candidates — based on Pew’s recent analyses.
Survey experiments using Opus 4.6 and GPT‑5.1 produced markedly different synthetic public‑opinion results, with neither model’s output matching actual human survey benchmarks, highlighting model-dependent distortions in AI polling.
US polling finds the Iran conflict is widely unpopular: 65% disapprove of President Trump’s handling of US military action, 33% approve, and many Americans expect the conflict to continue for months.
Digital twin synthetic surveys performed poorly at estimating public sentiment overall and were especially error‑prone for some subgroups, notably Republicans and Black adults, calling into question AI stand‑ins for human survey‑takers.
Global polling by Pew finds 64% of Americans in 2026 say social media harms democracy, with public attitudes in many other countries becoming markedly more negative compared with earlier years.
Synthetic survey responses did not match real public opinion on timely early‑2026 topics, showing large errors on presidential approval and attitudes toward data centres, indicating digital twins poorly capture current public mood on topical questions.
Globally, growing majorities say social media harms democracy by fostering manipulation and division, even as many also report it informs people and gives individuals a political voice, according to Pew Research Center’s global polling analysis.
Synthetic poll respondents were likelier than humans to converge on a single answer or skip response options, indicating reduced diversity and response variability in AI‑generated survey data versus human respondents.
Synthetic samples tended to overstate differences between demographic groups and presented some answers as nearly universal, implying digital twin approaches can distort subgroup estimates and population distributions.
Registered US voters prefer Democrats over Republicans for the House by 44% to 36% in the 2026 midterms; the dataset breaks preferences down by race, ethnicity, age and other demographics as part of a broader midterm analysis.
White evangelical Protestants and White Catholics in the US prefer Republican candidates for the 2026 midterms, while other religious groups are either split or lean Democratic, signalling wide variation in partisan alignment by faith.
A national Australian survey finds around 80% of adults back restricting children’s access to social media, including 51% who strongly support such limits.
Since 2015 the share of US adults who say they use cash for all or almost all weekly purchases has fallen from 24% to 12%, signalling a marked shift toward non-cash payment methods over the past decade.
AI‑generated survey respondents were much less likely than humans to choose “not sure” and far less likely to give factually incorrect answers, suggesting synthetic respondents express higher certainty and apparent factual knowledge.
Appendix material defining who counts as part of an online community, supplied as supplementary documentation to a Pew Research Center study of online community membership and behaviours.
Public dissatisfaction and low presidential approval accompany the 2026 US midterms, with Democratic voters showing higher engagement and turnout intention amid a generally sour national mood.