WSJ editors Aaron Zitner and Kara Dapena contend, “The Coalition That Powered Trump to Victory in 2024 Is Starting to Fray.”
President Trump’s victory in 2024 not only put a Republican in the White House but gave the party hope that its appeal was attracting new groups of voters. Trump drew unexpectedly large shares of young voters and Black and Latino voters—groups that had largely resisted the GOP.
After broadening the Republican coalition, Trump is at risk of shrinking it. Trump came close to winning young voters—those under age 30—in 2024, a sharp reversal from his 25-point loss among young voters in 2020. He also made gains among Black, Hispanic and other minority groups, losing by a far smaller margin than in 2020. And he improved his showing among seniors.
Dapena produced this graphic to illustrate:
Alas,
Now that he is back in the White House, these groups have grown increasingly unhappy with his job performance.
Since taking office, Trump’s job-approval rating has fallen across all segments of the public—even among his most ardent supporters. Now, he draws positive job ratings from only a few major voter groups. One is the group that has backed Trump since he became a national political figure: white, working-class voters without a four-year degree.
Even among white, working-class voters, Trump now draws equivocal or even negative job ratings among women. His support remains strong, by contrast, among white men who don’t have a four-year degree.
The rest has already been foreshadowed:
Trump’s improvement among young voters, those under age 30, was one of the noteworthy developments in the election. He lost among such voters by only 4 percentage points, a large survey of the electorate called AP VoteCast found. Now, disapproval outweighs approval by 10 points and even more than 20 points among young people.
Similarly, voters who are Black or Latino, and those from minority groups overall, give increasingly negative assessments of the president’s performance.
So, basically, Trump still has strong support among his core base but is losing support among all other groups. Which, frankly, we’d have expected even in a normal administration, let alone one whose policies have been—regardless of whether one supports them—quite radical in so many areas all at once.
White voters account for at least 70% of the electorate, and Trump won them by 14 percentage points in 2024, AP VoteCast found. They initially held a positive view of Trump’s job performance. Now, some polls find his rating to be more negative than positive.
For many Americans Trump has always been an unacceptable choice for president. But among other voters, analysts say, the polls reflect an initial impression of his presidency, not a final conclusion.
“It’s still early in his term, and there’s a group of people who have a ‘wait and see’ attitude,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has worked for former President Joe Biden and now co-directs Wall Street Journal political polls. Views could change as voters learn whether Trump’s tariffs produce a manufacturing resurgence, as promised, or lead to higher prices, as many Americans have feared. In late March, about one-third of voters said that inflation wasn’t a problem for them now, but that it could be a problem in the future.
Still, sinking approval ratings give the president the challenging assignment of persuading people to change their minds, said David Winston, a Republican strategist and pollster.
“Once people form an initial impression, you have to do things to change it. That’s not easy to do,” he said. “But it’s an initial position, not a final conclusion, like where people were with Biden” in judging the former president harshly by the end of his term.
One important factor will be how the public comes to view Trump’s handling of the economy.
During Trump’s first term, voters often saw Trump as a strong steward of the economy, even when they didn’t approve of his overall job performance. Today, Trump’s image as a good manager of the economy is being tarnished.
That has led to a reversal in public opinion: For the first time, Trump is drawing lower marks for his handling of the economy than he is for his overall management of the presidency.
Most of the time, it’s silly to assign a lot of credit or blame to Presidents for the state of the economy. It’s so massive and globalized that the impact of policymaking from the executive branch is a rounding error. But that’s not the case here, where Trump has used emergency powers to impose huge tariffs across the board and then changed them over and over again. Regardless of the longer term wisdom of the policy, it was bound to have significant short term effects, both from the price increases themselves but also from the sheer chaotic nature of it all.
Given the extreme sorting of our parties over the last decade, there just aren’t many persuadable voters at this point. It’s mostly a matter of whether the candidates can motivate their supporters to turn out to vote.
But it’s also true that the realignment has pushed the Democratic Party further left on some social issues, alienating parts of the white working class and more socially conservative people, particularly Black and Hispanic men, who would otherwise be a more natural fit with the party. And that there is a subset of voters who see elections as nothing more than a referendum on the economy.
Using extreme measures to deport illegal aliens and dismantle parts of the government that code “woke” or progressive is just what the base was looking for. But the newer parts of the coalition wanted their grocery and gas bills to come down, and that hasn’t happened. The performative cruelty does nothing to help them.
