By Aaron Blake · The Washington Post (c) 2025
American politics in recent years has featured no shortage of high-impact controversies involving failures to protect sensitive and classified information:
– Former president Joe Biden’s declining faculties came into focus last year amid an investigation into his mishandling of years-old classified documents. He later dropped out of his reelection race.
– President Donald Trump was previously indicted for allegedly not just taking classified documents when his first term ended but allegedly also illegally obstructing the return of them.
– And there’s an argument to be made that Trump may never have even been president had it not been for his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton’s fateful decision to use a private email server, which sparked a lengthy investigation.
The Trump administration’s new Signal scandal is still fresh, but the early indication is that the American people think it’s even worse than all three of those.
And that could make the administration’s never-back-down posture more difficult to maintain.
YouGov is out with the first poll on the matter.
It came after it was revealed Monday that top Trump administration officials planned an attack on Yemen’s Houthi rebels on the unclassified Signal messaging app and inadvertently invited a prominent journalist. The journalist, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, disclosed the fuller details of the messages on Wednesday after the Trump administration downplayed them. The details included precisely when the attacks would arrive and what aircraft and weapons would be used – the kind of information that could jeopardize the mission and American lives if it fell into the wrong hands.
The poll found that about three-fourths of Americans (74 percent) said the situation was at least a “somewhat serious” problem. And a majority (53 percent) said it was “very serious.”
Why is that noteworthy? Because that’s higher than said the same of Biden’s classified documents, Trump’s classified documents or Clinton’s server.
Previous YouGov and CNN polling showed between 30 percent and 38 percent of Americans labeled Clinton’s private email server a “very serious” problem when it was first revealed in 2015. The highest number on record appears to be 43 percent, when the issue was polled again in 2022.
For Trump’s classified documents, the “very serious” number was generally in the 40s – 42 percent in a YouGov poll and 49 percent in a Quinnipiac University poll.
And the more limited polling we have on Biden’s classified documents case shows between 30 percent and 39 percent called it “very serious.”
None of these matters eclipsed a majority labeling them “very serious” in these polls, but the Signal controversy has – rather quickly.
What’s more, the new YouGov poll shows 28 percent of Republicans say this was a “very serious” problem, despite it being a problem for a Republican administration.
That’s higher than the highest percentage of Democrats to view Clinton’s email server as a “very serious” problem: 19 percent in the 2022 YouGov poll. It’s also higher than the highest percentage of Republicans to view Trump’s classified documents as a “very serious” problem: 20 percent in a Reuters-Ipsos poll last year.
We’ll await more data. But it’s logical to believe that this mishandling of sensitive information might indeed be more concerning to Americans than its predecessors.
While Clinton clearly suffered from her email problems, that’s largely because of the drip-drip-drip nature of revelations spread out at a wholly inopportune time: during her 2016 campaign. The revelations were compounded by an 11th-hour announcement of new evidence from then-FBI Director James B. Comey in late October 2016.
With Trump’s documents, his problems were arguably less about him taking the documents in the first place than refusing to return them.
Where the new Signal controversy seems to differ from the others is in its easy-to-grasp potential impact. We don’t know much about the contents of the emails Clinton exposed or the documents Trump and Biden had, nor do we have some specific mission or people we know could have been imperiled by the failure to secure this information.
With the Signal messages, we now know the specific content of the messages. And it’s not difficult to comprehend how this information falling into the wrong hands ahead of the Houthi strikes could have seriously harmed the mission or even cost people their lives.
That didn’t happen, but the peril of mishandling this particular type of sensitive information is more real and more easily grasped.
Beyond that, it’s possible that because this doesn’t directly involve Trump personally it would allow people to be a bit more honest with themselves and with pollsters. Partisans never like to believe or admit their guy did something wrong; perhaps it’s easier for Republicans and Trump-leaning independents to say that national security adviser Michael Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth screwed up.
Regardless of the reasons, it suggests this isn’t going away.
The White House can pretend all it likes that this isn’t a big deal. But more people appear to believe it’s a big deal than all of these other recent big-deal controversies. And that makes it harder to play off and move past without accountability.