Those Saying President Is Doing 'Very Well' Halved in Four Months
The share of voters rating President Lee Jae-myung's governance as 'doing very well' halved in four months. In the fifth wave of the '2025–2026 Voter Panel Survey' (a method of surveying the same people periodically), commissioned by The Hankyoreh and the Korean Association of Party Studies to polling firm STI, positive responses stood at 19.2%. That is down 21.7 percentage points from 40.9% four months earlier, and nearly half the figure of a year ago (36.3%). Overall positive evaluations also fell to 49.3%, down 17.6 percentage points from the previous survey (66.9%). Negative evaluations rose 17.8 percentage points to 46.5%, showing only a narrow gap with positive assessments.
Housing and tax policy (25.3%) ranked first as the reason for negative assessments of the administration's governance, followed by the economy, livelihood, and welfare policy (18.0%) and prosecutorial reform (14.1%). STI senior researcher Park Jae-ik analyzed, "The exodus can be attributed to the administration drifting away from their demands on housing taxation and the supplementary investigation authority." While abolishing the supplementary investigation power remains a 'reform' agenda item for the traditional support base, it is seen as a 'livelihood' issue by the 'New Lee Jae-myung,' whose base is mostly centrists and conservatives.
The exodus occurred both inside and outside the support base. By political leaning, centrists' positive evaluations fell 21.0 percentage points from 70.2% to 49.2%, the largest drop. The share of 'New Lee Jae-myung' voters, who did not back the president in the presidential election but later turned to him, also fell to 9.1%, half the level of the fourth survey (18.5%). Positive evaluations fell most sharply in Seoul, from 69.4% to 45.6%, and among people in their 30s, from 67.3% to 45.8%.
Negative assessments also dominated on individual issues. Negative evaluations of housing policy stood at 58.5%, higher than positive ones (29.7%). Opposition to the deployment to the Strait of Hormuz, at 57.8%, was double the support (28.2%).
This was the final survey of five conducted over one year and four months, from before last May's presidential election through this month. It partially reflected the president's press conference (Sept. 18) and the withdrawal of Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won (Sept. 19). STI conducted the survey of 1,592 voters nationwide from Sept. 15 to 20 via mobile web surveys and both wired and wireless telephone interviews, with a margin of error of ±2.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
