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Donald Trump's approval falls to record low of 31% two weeks before US midterms

A four-day Reuters/Ipsos poll put Democrats 12 points ahead on the congressional ballot, with voters citing fuel prices as their main concern before the 3 November elections.

ScrollBeat DeskPublished: 20 Oct 2026, 16:26

File photo: US President Donald Trump boards a helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House on 6 October 2026. The White House / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Donald Trump's approval rating has fallen to 31 per cent, the lowest of his two terms, two weeks before Americans vote in congressional midterm elections on 3 November.

The figure comes from a four-day Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Monday. It is one point lower than the same poll found a fortnight earlier, as voters named fuel prices and the cost of living as their main concerns.

Asked how they would vote if the elections were held that day, 47 per cent of registered voters chose the Democrats and 35 per cent chose the Republicans. The 12-point gap is the widest Democratic lead in the poll this election cycle and puts both the House of Representatives and the Senate in play.

The survey was conducted online with 1,679 American adults, including 1,279 registered voters. The margin of error is 2 percentage points for all respondents and 3 points for registered voters.

Other polls released in recent days point the same way. A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos survey published on Monday put Trump's approval at 33 per cent, with seven in ten respondents saying petrol was becoming unaffordable, while an NBC poll on Sunday found 71 per cent thought the country was on the wrong track and 55 per cent would vote Democratic.

Trump's standing has slid since the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran on 28 February, which pushed up petrol and diesel prices and fed through to the wider economy. He spent Monday campaigning for Republican candidates in Kansas.

Generic ballot questions measure national sentiment and do not decide individual House and Senate races, where district boundaries and local contests shape the result. Republicans still hold structural advantages in several states.

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Google Cloud failure disrupts banking apps and websites across Europe

Google reported intermittent network failures in its europe-west2 region on Tuesday morning. Revolut said card payments, transfers and withdrawals were affected, while Halifax acknowledged problems with its app.

ScrollBeat Desk20 Oct 2026, 17:44Open this article

A Google data centre at Eemshaven in the Netherlands, photographed in 2023. Google reported network failures in its europe-west2 cloud region on 20 October 2026; the affected facility was not this site. Wvdp / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

A failure across Google Cloud services in western Europe disrupted websites and mobile banking on Tuesday, with the UK fintech Revolut and high-street lender Halifax among the companies reporting problems.

Google said on its Cloud Status page that multiple services in europe-west2 were producing elevated errors and intermittent network failures. The problems were first detected at about 07:00 BST, according to bdnews24, and Google said its engineers were still investigating without a workaround.

Revolut told customers its app was partly unavailable, with sign-in, card payments, transfers, cash withdrawals and cryptocurrency services affected. The company said customers' money and data were safe and that work to fix the disruption had begun when it was identified that morning.

Halifax said it was aware that some customers were having trouble with its app and website but did not say whether the faults were connected to Google's cloud problems. DownDetector, an outage-tracking service, recorded a sharp rise in reports across several websites on Tuesday morning, although it was not confirmed that every affected company relies on Google Cloud.

Google had not given a timeline for restoring services or identified the cause by Tuesday afternoon. The episode again showed how a fault in one cloud provider can ripple through payment and information services used by millions of people.

Cloud providers sell capacity in named regions so that customers can place services close to their users. A problem in one region can therefore take down every application that has not been designed to switch to another.

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France extends curfews after riots, with more than 2,500 arrested

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the overnight restrictions will continue where needed after France's worst street violence in years, which left more than 3,000 businesses looted and 67 people jailed.

ScrollBeat Desk20 Oct 2026, 17:20Open this article

Riot police stand outside a looted shop in Paris on 17 October 2026, during the unrest that began with protests over school conditions and the cost of living. Jorge Jaramillo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

France will keep night-time curfews in place on Tuesday and extend them wherever needed, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said, after weekend riots that damaged public buildings, looted shops and led to more than 2,500 arrests.

Lecornu said the targeted restrictions introduced in Paris and other cities on Monday had helped keep the night calm, and that new curfews would be decided "where the situation requires it". Parts of Paris, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux and Nice have been placed under curfew.

The unrest began on Saturday, when largely peaceful student protests over poor conditions in high schools and the rising cost of living turned into some of the worst street violence France has seen in years. More than 3,000 businesses were hit by looting, according to preliminary estimates, and 67 people have already been jailed. Officials said the violence came six months before the presidential election.

The government is also under pressure to respond to the cost-of-living complaints behind the protests. President Emmanuel Macron, on a tour of the Gulf, secured an extra 200,000 tonnes of diesel a month from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, his office said. Added to 95,000 tonnes previously agreed with Saudi Arabia, the shipments amount to about 10 per cent of France's monthly consumption.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez offered to resign on Sunday, saying police had lost control during the unrest. Macron rejected the offer. Lecornu has called emergency meetings, including talks with major social media platforms, and will meet trade unions on Wednesday and political parties on Thursday.

The violence has injured demonstrators as well as damaging property. In Mulhouse, a 17-year-old girl lost an eye, and in Saint-Etienne a 17-year-old boy lost a hand to a grenade, according to reports cited by AFP.

The political reaction has been sharp across the spectrum. Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen called the unrest a wake-up call that exposed a deep crisis of authority, while US President Donald Trump said the trouble was caused by immigration rather than schools.

Several countries, including the United States, China and Germany, have issued travel advisories for their citizens in France. Police said the night from Monday to Tuesday passed without major incidents, but new protests have been called for the coming weekend.