October 17, 2025
With a U.S. brokered ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas negotiated, more adults approve of President Trump’s handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict now than a month ago. However, approval on that issue has not translated into higher overall support for the president.
Forty-seven percent approve of how Trump is handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, up 10 percentage points from September. The October AP-NORC poll was taken after the ceasefire deal was announced but before the hostages and prisoners were freed. Opinions of Trump’s job performance overall and his handling of the economy, health care, and immigration are about the same as September.
Independents are more likely to disapprove than approve of Trump’s job performance and his handling of key issues. Democratic disapproval of Trump’s handling of the economy, health care, immigration, and his job overall outpaces Republican approval. And while partisans generally align along familiar party lines on Trump’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Democrats express more approval for the president in this area than for his handling of other issues or his overall job performance.
Fifty-six percent of adults have an unfavorable opinion of Trump and 39% favorable. Vice President Vance’s approval and disapproval numbers are slightly lower with more people saying that they don’t know enough to have an opinion.
More Democrats have negative impressions of Trump than Republicans who feel favorably toward him. Democrats also more often have unfavorable impressions of Vance compared to Republicans. Independents are more likely to disapprove of Trump and Vance than approve of them. But more than a third of independents don’t know enough about the vice president to have an opinion of him.
Compared to those without a college degree, adults with a degree tend to view Trump (65% v. 50%) and Vance (57% v. 42%) more unfavorably. Adults under the age of 30 are more likely than those 60 or older to view Trump (67% v. 48%) and Vance (56% v. 42%) negatively.
Most adults (69%) feel the country is headed in the wrong direction while 30% say it is moving in the right one.
Adults younger than 30 are more pessimistic than adults 60 or older about the direction of the country (81% v. 58%) as are women compared with men (75% v. 62%) and Democrats compared with Republicans (93% v. 39%).
The nationwide poll was conducted October 9-13, 2025 using the AmeriSpeak® Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 1,289 adults. The overall margin of sampling error is +/- 3.8 percentage points. Hispanic adults were sampled at a higher rate than their proportion of the population for reasons of analysis. The overall margin of sampling error for the 378 interviews completed with Hispanic respondents is +/- 6.9 percentage points.
- Suggested Citation: AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “Increased approval of Trump’s handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict.” (October 2025). https://apnorc.org/projects/increased-approval-of-trumps-handling-of-the-israel-palestine-conflict/
