The American electorate is “fed up” with traditional Democratic and Republican politicians, according to CNN’s Harry Enten. That is not just a gut feeling, either.
Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, eats, sleeps and breathes “all of the polls,” from Gallup to Quinnipiac to The New York Times to NBC News, and everything in between. His take, he told TheWrap during a recent conversation, is based on what he sees pop up again and again in the data.
“There’s a great frustration with the two major parties,” Enten said. “And when there’s a great frustration with the two major parties, all of a sudden, people become far more willing to listen to issues and data sets and points of view that you might not have found to be acceptable in the past.”
Enten said this frustration — and willingness to choose an outsider candidate — fueled President Trump’s political rise in 2016, and again last year, when he won his second election. The same thing just happened in New York City, he noted, when 33-year-old Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani — who has called for government-run grocery stores and a freeze on rent hikes — beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic mayoral primary.
The 37-year-old Enten said Mamdani’s improbable rise does not look so improbable when you look at recent polling. He pointed to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from June that showed 62% of self-identified Democrats felt Democratic party leadership should be replaced with new people; only 24% of respondents disagreed.
“It’s basically a party that is saying, ‘We don’t like the way things are operating, and we’re willing to throw the baby out with the bath water,’” Enten said. “Issue sets that [Democrats] might previously have been willing to be dismissed, they will say, ‘OK, that doesn’t seem that extreme.’ Affordability? That seems relatively reasonable to us. Zohran Mamdani, what was his No. 1 issue? It was affordability.”
He added that there is a through line between Mamdani and President Trump — something that goes beyond their worlds-apart policies.
“One of the great commonalities between Mamdani and Trump is they seem to be real guys; that they say what they mean and mean what they say. They are seen as a genuine article and they’re able to connect with people,” Enten said. “You can say what you want about Trump, but you read those [Truth Social posts] from him, and you will say, ‘Wow, that sounds like Donald Trump and that does not sound like somebody who is holding back in any sort of way. That sounds like a guy who is genuinely who he claims to be.’ And I think that’s rather important.”
Enten delivered his message with the same passion that has helped make him one of CNN’s better-known stars in 2025. His TV breakdowns of the latest polls routinely rack up big views on X, thanks in large part to his approach, which resembles an energetic and personable professor who is able to keep you from falling asleep in your college stats class.
Two of his posts this week — one on Democratic voters shifting against being Pro-Israel, and another on President Trump’s approval rating among Republicans surging compared to 2017 — are each approaching 2 million views on the social media platform.
“Republicans love Donald Trump the way that Americans love Disneyworld,” Enten explains in his Trump segment.
Enten told TheWrap it is fitting he ended up with a media job that is built on his love for numbers. The New York native said he was obsessed with baseball stats growing up, and he was first drawn to political polling as a middle schooler in 2000 during the Democratic and Republican primaries. After launching his own stats-focused blog while at Dartmouth and later working at FiveThirtyEight, Enten said he has been in his dream job at CNN since 2018.
“Let me tell you, if you had told me 20 years ago I was going to be in the job that I’m in, I would have taken it every single gosh-darn time. I have the time of my life,” he shared.
And one reason Enten is a fan of polls, he said: they illuminate when prominent media and social media narratives do not match up with the reality of what voters actually believe.
“We’ve seen a lot of people [say], ‘Oh, Trump’s rhetoric is going to turn immigrants — all types of immigrants — against him.’ No, that is, in fact, not the case,” Enten said. “We’ve seen a tremendous shift among immigrants who are in the country legally, whereby they were voting in huge numbers for Democrats as recently as four years ago. Basically, in the past election, they were dead even. They were dead even. And so that says, more than anything else, that all of a sudden there is this great frustration about illegal immigration in this country in a way that’s simply not understood by a lot of people.”
Moving forward, Enten said his daily diet of polls has shown “the world is a very complicated place” where “many things can be true at the same time.”
“It can be true that Donald Trump, historically speaking, is in a very bad position in terms of his approval rating. However, it can also be true that Donald Trump is doing better than he was doing eight years ago at this point, and significantly so, depending on when we’re looking at the exact measurement,” he added.
Enten continued: “It can be true that Democrats right now have an advantage on the generic congressional ballot, as we look ahead to 2026 [midterms] — but it might not be as big of an advantage as they had eight years ago. And it can be true that Democrats are likely to pick up the House of Representatives, because that’s historically what happens in midterm elections. The party in the White House suffers heat.”
Until then, Enten will be watching the polls, sharing his big takeaways on CNN and loving every minute of it.
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