Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture. President Donald Trump loves football, but football may no longer love him. One year ago, Trump became the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. He had just retaken the White House after winning the popular vote, and he held a net-positive approval rating. And seemingly as a tribute to his bigotry, the NFL painted over the words “End Racism” in its end zones, replacing it with the vague and benign “Choose Love.” He likely went to the game expecting to be cheered.  This year, though, Trump won’t attend. If you ask him, it’s because the game, which will be hosted in California, is “just too far away.” That’s a particularly funny thing to say for a man with Air Force One at his disposal. Nevertheless, he wants you to know that it has nothing, nothing at all, to do with his now-dismal approval rating. No, much the opposite, he claims.  “I’ve [gotten] great hands [at] the Super Bowl. They like me,” he told the New York Post last month. But if Trump believed that, he would be there. The real reason he won’t attend is that he, perhaps more than any previous president, grasps the political power of football in America—and he now sees that it could be used against him. In the U.S., no sport attracts more of the public’s love than football. Last summer, Quinnipiac University found that not only do 29% of Americans call football their personal favorite sport, but also an overwhelming majority (74%) recognize it as “America’s sport.” x Datawrapper Content More relevant to this year’s midterm elections, nearly 7 in 10 likely voters are fans of the NFL, according to a new poll from Echelon Insights. That’s far more than the second-most popular sport, baseball, which 47% are fans of. And 56% of Americans say they’ll definitely or probably watch the Super Bowl this year, per YouGov. Trump is attuned to these facts. When endorsing political candidates or even nominating judges, he is sure to mention whether the person played or coached football, no matter if it was in college or the NFL. He’s even taken the unusual step of lobbying for Washington, D.C., to host the 2027 NFL Draft. You have to wonder if that’s one reason he flooded the city with troops last year, signaling to the locals what he may do if they try to protest the big televised event. Trump’s social media feeds are filled with football, too. He’s posted demands that teams bring back their formerly racist names. And during this January alone, he’s spoken out on team staffing decisions, Hall of Fame ballots, and the NFL’s new “sissy” kickoff rules. To him, the previous rule was “Big Time, Strong, Glamorous, and Exciting,” no matter that the new rule has more than doubled the number of regular-season kickoff returns, which sagged to an all-time low during the 2023 season. In fact, while in office, Trump’s personal and governmental social media accounts have mentioned “football” or “NFL” in 161 posts on X and Truth Social, according to a Daily Kos analysis. That far outpaces former Presidents Barack Obama (26) and Joe Biden (15). x Datawrapper Content Some of that may derive from the fact that Trump is both a windbag and a football fan. It’s not hard to find him posting online about the poor showings of his hometown teams, the New York Jets and the Giants. Instead, he seems to prefer the New England Patriots, regularly congratulating them on social media, praising their performance, and wishing them good luck. He’s close with former quarterback Tom Brady and team owner Robert Kraft, so maybe his fandom is based on personal ties. Or maybe it’s because they’ve won a lot of Super Bowls (unlike, say, the Jets). It’s hard to know how much of Trump’s football focus is due to his own fandom or to a strategy to reach less engaged voters, like the one he employed when he made the rounds on “bro” podcasts ahead of the 2024 election. It’s probably both. Then-President Barack Obama throws a football at Soldier Field following the NATO working dinner in Chicago in May 2012. Forgive this comparison, but like Trump, Obama understood the special power of football. He was not shy about his love for the Chicago Bears, even welcoming the 1985 team to the White House in 2011 and declaring them “the greatest team in NFL history.” Even now, Obama will pop up on ESPN to cheer on Da Bears. Last month, the Obama Foundation posted an old photo on Facebook of him throwing a football and jokingly offered him up to quarterback the team. Sports fandom, among many other things, made him likable and relatable.  That’s why Obama always agreed to the Super Bowl’s traditional pregame interview. It gave him a platform to reach a very large and less politically engaged America. It’s also probably why Trump brought the interview back in 2025, after Biden skipped it two years in a row, despite the fact that the interviews are usually softballs—or should I say deflated balls? In fact, Biden dodging those two interviews presaged what would come later in 2024, at that catastrophic presidential debate, where he made repeated gaffes and struggled to complete his thoughts. In a given year, the Super Bowl brings in more viewers than any other single TV event, and it seems Biden—or at least his team—was afraid of that. After all, his number of public events greatly declined toward the end of his presidency.  x Datawrapper Content But when it comes to politics, the most meaningful aspect of this year’s Super Bowl may not be that Trump will avoid the stadium and the boos. It’s that the NFL itself is starting to create separation from him.  This past September, the league and its partners announced that Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny would perform at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, sparking backlash from the right. Not only did conservatives not want to suffer the immeasurable pain of hearing a person sing in Spanish, but also Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, stands fervently opposed to Trump’s immigration agenda. The artist mocked Trump in a music video last summer, and he went as far as to avoid performing in the U.S. out of a fear of federal agents harassing his fans. And yet, despite this right-wing backlash, the NFL held firm. Bad Bunny, who will perform at the Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, departs after a news conference on Feb. 5. In October, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, «[Bady Bunny is] one of the most popular entertainers in the world. ... I think it's going to be exciting and a united moment.» And later that month, the league’s chief marketing officer added, “Not everyone has to like everything we do. Bad Bunny is fucking awesome.” Even individual teams have backed El Conejo Malo. In November, Charlotte Jones, who is the ​​Dallas Cowboys chief brand officer and whose father owns the team, told a podcast that having Bad Bunny perform would be “awesome.” “We have a mixed culture and our whole society is based on immigrants who have come here and founded our country, and I think we can celebrate that,” she said. Quite the turn from just a year ago, when the NFL scrubbed “End Racism” off its fields in deference to Trump. And all of those above statements came before Trump’s federal agents killed two Americans in Minnesota in January, sparking protests across the country.  In fact, one day after federal immigration agents killed intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti, Trump took to social media to post about the NFL’s new kickoff rules. “I can’t watch the new NFL Kickoff. Like many others, I just turn my head. Who has the right to make such a change? So disparaging to the game!” he wrote to a nation that had just witnessed its second needless execution in a handful of weeks. Trump wasn’t reading the room then, but he seems to be reading it now—and he’s not liking what it’s telling him. Any updates? Democratic governors have been a brake on the Trump administration, and there’s some good news for two high-profile candidates this year: New polls show Sen. Amy Klobuchar with double-digit leads over her Republican rivals in Minnesota, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul with a 26-percentage-point lead over the expected Republican candidate, Bruce Blakeman. Vibe check Another reason Trump might want to avoid the Super Bowl is that one of the teams has the most liberal fanbase in the NFL. Forty-three percent of Democrats have a “very favorable” view of the Seattle Seahawks, more than any other team, according to data that Morning Consult released in 2020. Only 27% of Republicans are Seahawks fans. That puts the partisan difference at a sizable 16 points. The wild thing is, all but one team—the Tennessee Titans—has a fandom that leans left. It also could be that liberals just like a wider swath of teams than Republicans do. Or some mix of both. x Datawrapper Content Read more