HADDON BLUFF, Tenn. — A Haddon Bluff man said Monday that the president’s approval rating of roughly 34 percent represents “a clear majority of real Americans,” explaining that the 62 percent who disapprove “are just louder,” and that a silent majority, by definition, never shows up in polls, “which is how you know they’re there.”
Polling averages put President Donald Trump’s approval at about 34.6 percent and his disapproval at 62 percent as of Oct. 12. One major poll this month put his approval at 32 percent, matching the lowest reading of his second term. Gallup, which had tracked presidential approval for more than eight decades, stopped publishing the measure this year. A poll taken in October of last year found 48 percent approval.
“Silent people don’t answer polls. That’s what makes them silent,” said Wayne Kessling, 67, a retired propane delivery driver, seated at the counter of the Bluff Diner, where he has eaten breakfast at 6:15 a.m. every weekday since 1998. “The 62 percent, you hear them all day. On TV, at the bank, my daughter. Us, you don’t hear. We’re the majority you can’t hear. Which is the biggest kind.”
Kessling keeps a laminated card in his wallet bearing the results of the October 2025 poll, which found that 48 percent of registered voters approved of the president’s job performance. He said he laminated it “the day it came out” and has not felt the need to update it.
“People say that poll is a year old. I say it’s the current number, because it’s the one I have,” he said. “You don’t throw out a good number just because it got older. My truck’s from 2011. Still runs.”
Asked about the 32 percent poll, Kessling said he had seen it and rejected it on methodological grounds. “They called a thousand people. I’ve met more people than that,” he said. “I’ve met more people than that at this diner.”
He then conducted his own poll, standing and asking the diner’s 13 customers and its cashier to raise their hands if they approved. Eleven did. Two customers did not look up. The cashier, Deb, did not raise her hand, which Kessling attributed to “her being paid to stay neutral.”
“Eleven out of 14. That’s 79 percent,” he said. “That’s a real poll. That’s not a phone call. I can see their faces.”
Kessling said the national figure did not concern him because of what he called “the math.” “Thirty-four percent of 340 million people is 115 million people,” he said, writing the figures on a napkin. “That’s more people than live in most countries. You know what you call more people than most countries? A majority.”
Asked what he would call the 62 percent, which would be about 211 million people, Kessling said, “Loud.”
He credited the end of Gallup’s tracking to the numbers themselves. “They stopped measuring because they couldn’t find anybody who disapproved anymore,” he said. “When you can’t find the other side, you stop looking. That’s just science.”
Kessling said he believes that if the polls were done correctly, “at a diner, in the morning, with your hand up,” approval would be “somewhere around 80, 85, minimum.” He said the polling industry was “the only industry in America where the customer is always wrong.”
He also offered what he called “the final proof.” “If we’re the majority, and we’re losing every poll,” he said, “then the polls are the minority.”
Asked whether he personally knew anyone who disapproved of the president, Kessling said he did not. His wife, Linda, who had come to the diner to drive him home, raised her hand from the doorway. Deb, the cashier, raised hers. So did one of the two customers who had not looked up.
Kessling said that brought his poll to 11 out of 15, or 73 percent, “which is still a majority, and it’s still morning.” He then asked Deb for his check, which he said he would be paying for “on behalf of the silent majority,” and left a 10 percent tip.