Gallup, the polling organization that has tracked presidential approval ratings for 88 years, announced Wednesday that it's done. The company confirmed it will cease publishing approval and favorability ratings for individual political figures this year.

No more quarterly snapshots. No more approval trend lines. No more of the single most-cited metric in American political journalism — at least not from Gallup.

As Breitbart noted, media organizations have long regarded the Gallup Presidential Approval Rating as one of the leading measures of public opinion on a president’s job performance.

The Timing Speaks for Itself

Gallup insisted the move has nothing to do with the current political environment. When The Hill asked whether the company had received any feedback from the White House or the Trump administration, the spokesperson was unequivocal:

"This is a strategic shift solely based on Gallup's research goals and priorities."

Take them at their word. But also note the timing. An 88-year tradition doesn't end on a random Wednesday without context. Gallup survived the Truman upset. It survived the Nixon era, the Clinton scandals, the polarization of the Obama and Trump years. It tracked approval through world wars, recessions, impeachments, and pandemics. And now — now — it decides the metric no longer fits its mission.

The company says its future will center on broader research. A spokesperson told The Hill:

"Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people's lives. That work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll, and our portfolio of U.S. and global research."

That's a lot of words to describe walking away from the thing people actually know you for.

What Gallup Was — and What It Became

For decades, the Gallup presidential approval rating functioned as a kind of national scoreboard. Media outlets treated it as the definitive measure of a president's standing with the public. It shaped narratives, drove coverage cycles, and gave pundits something to argue about every few weeks.

But here's what's worth examining: who benefited most from that scoreboard, and who didn't?

Presidential approval polling, as practiced by legacy institutions, became less a neutral thermometer and more a weapon of narrative warfare. When numbers were bad for a Republican president, they led the evening news. When they ticked up, the coverage shifted to methodology concerns or "rally effects" that supposedly inflated the figures. The asymmetry wasn't subtle.

The broader polling industry has spent the last decade hemorrhaging credibility. Catastrophic misses in 2016 and 2020 weren't just embarrassing — they revealed structural problems that the industry still hasn't honestly confronted. When your models consistently undercount a massive segment of the electorate, the problem isn't the electorate.

Gallup stepping away from individual political figures doesn't fix that credibility gap. But it does acknowledge, however obliquely, that something about the old model stopped working.

A Convenient Exit

The spokesperson added one more layer of varnish:

"This change is part of a broader, ongoing effort to align all of Gallup's public work with its mission. We look forward to continuing to offer independent research that adheres to the highest standards of social science."

"Part of a broader, ongoing effort" — yet no specifics about what else is changing. No roadmap. No timeline for other shifts. Just the one that happens to grab headlines.

There's a version of this story where Gallup deserves credit for recognizing that single-number approval ratings flatten complex political realities into cable news chyrons. That's a reasonable critique of the metric. Reducing a presidency to "43% approve" was always reductive, and the way media weaponized those numbers made it worse.

But if that's the reasoning, say so. Don't hide behind corporate mission statements about "thought leadership" and "social science." The vagueness invites exactly the speculation Gallup claims to want to avoid.

What Fills the Void

Gallup's exit doesn't mean presidential approval polling disappears. Dozens of outlets and aggregators will continue producing the numbers. If anything, Gallup's departure clears the field for less rigorous operations to fill the space — organizations with smaller samples, shakier methodologies, and more overt partisan leanings.

That's the real consequence here. For all its flaws, Gallup brought institutional weight and historical continuity to the enterprise. Whatever replaces it in the public conversation will almost certainly be less disciplined.

The media won't stop obsessing over approval numbers. They'll just cite different ones — whichever ones tell the story they've already decided to tell.

Eighty-eight years of data, and the institution that built it decided the project no longer served its mission. Maybe that's true. Or maybe the numbers just stopped saying what the right people wanted them to say.

Either way, the scoreboard is dark. The game continues without it.