Pete Buttigieg's approval rating

Approval rating vs favorability. A job-approval rating asks whether people approve of how someone is handling a current office. Because Buttigieg left the Department of Transportation in January 2025 and holds no office today, there is no job to rate - so this page reports what pollsters actually ask about him: whether Americans have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him. That favorability number is the honest answer to "Pete Buttigieg approval rating."

Source: Economist/YouGov national poll toplines. Favorable and unfavorable totals are the values printed in each official YouGov release; each figure was read directly from the topline PDF. A full sweep of the weekly toplines confirmed Buttigieg's favorability was not asked in the intervening weeks. Latest data: May 29 - June 1, 2026.

Favorability is a broad-audience sentiment number: it asks all Americans - Democrats, Republicans, and independents - whether they view Buttigieg favorably. That makes it useful for gauging his general-election standing, but it is not the same as support inside a Democratic primary.

• Favorability, not job approval: Buttigieg holds no office, so there is no job-approval number; the figures above are favorable-versus-unfavorable opinion.
• A stable favorable number: his favorable rating has held near 33% for more than a year, while his unfavorable rating settled around 35% - leaving him close to even and slightly net-negative.
• A large undecided middle: roughly a third of adults offer no opinion in every wave, more room to move than the most polarizing national figures have.
• Primary vs general: he has placed at or near the top of several early 2028 Democratic primary polls, because a primary is decided by Democratic voters, among whom he is better known and better rated.

As a separate reference, YouGov also runs a continuous popularity tracker for Buttigieg on a different positive/neutral/negative scale. It recently showed roughly 35% with a positive opinion and 24% negative, with about 15% neutral, and found that about three in four Americans have heard of him. Because that question uses a different scale, its numbers are not directly comparable to the favorable/unfavorable series above, but it points to the same picture: a widely known figure about whom a large share of the public still holds no strong opinion.

Buttigieg is one of the most-discussed possible 2028 Democratic candidates and has led or placed near the top of several early national primary surveys, yet his favorability among all adults is only slightly net-negative and has barely moved for more than a year. Both things are true at once: a candidate can be a leading name in his party's primary while remaining largely undefined for a big slice of the broader electorate. Whether he can turn that large undecided middle in his favor would be one of the central questions of a 2028 campaign, if he runs. He has not declared, and these numbers can move well before then.

Because Buttigieg holds no office and has not declared a 2028 campaign, fewer pollsters track his favorability on a regular basis than they do for sitting governors or the vice president, which is why this page anchors on the Economist/YouGov weekly series. See our Democratic candidates 2028 hub, is Pete Buttigieg running in 2028?, and Buttigieg's full 2028 profile for the bigger picture. Favorability numbers on this page are updated when a new Economist/YouGov reading includes him.