Trump’s New Voters Are Dissatisfied
Non-college-educated White men remain happy.
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.
I am not an expert on graphics but why do the images on these charts remind me of spermatoza?
AKA: Human life before conception.
These data are interesting. If I were conducting a poll, I think I’d ask some version of the following. Perhaps such data already exist?
Did you vote in the 2024 presidential election?
[if yes] Who did you vote for?
If you could go back in time, knowing then what you know now, would you vote in the 2024 presidential election?
[if yes] Who would you vote for?
***alternatively***
If the 2024 presidential election were re-run tomorrow, with the same candidates, would you vote?
[if yes] Who would you vote for?
Note, these questions also have problems (hypotheticals, time travel and all that). And yet they try to get at the same thing: voting behavior vs. voting behavior rather than voting behavior vs. approval.
@Mimai: That’s a strong point. A whole lot of people who find Trump repugnant nonetheless voted for him when the alternative was voting for Hillary or Kamala.
@Mimai: You ask people if they think they were wrong, you’re going to get an emotional reaction, not a thoughtful one.
Ask me if I think that I’m right and I’ll give a thoughtful affirmative response every time.
@Mister Bluster:
Me too. Only a fool insists he’s always right. I’ve been wrong on some big ones and I wear them like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. Lie to other people when you have to, never lie to yourself.
@Mister Bluster:..
Or as my daddy used to say:
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”
ETA: Bing Crosby
@James Joyner: ‘Repugnant’ is a particularly harsh sentiment you’re alluding to, so perhaps it is semantics to which I’m reacting. But, I don’t buy an affirmative vote for someone who disgusts you regardless of alternatives. Not voting at all – sure – but voting for?
Regretful Trump voters can leverage a few excuses I could find plausible, like buying into his grift on the economy. Trump’s winning message was based primarily on the silliness of assigning a lot of credit or blame to Presidents for the state of the economy, so if inflation was your single issue, I could sympathize with one’s regret of betrayal.
But, otherwise Trump is doing what he ran on – tariffs, mass deportation, authoritarian “Trump will Fix it.” His personal character, or lack thereof, is well documented. The things people would find repugnant about Trump as candidate or POTUS were his selling points in 2024. “I held my nose and voted for Trump because Harris would have been worse” is a rationalization we shouldn’t accept. Such an allowance glosses over the value judgement of anyone who would choose cruelty as advertised over the most repugnant things one could imagine Harris ever doing.
@James Joyner
Non-college-educated White menRacist assholes remain happy.Fixed that for you.
@EddieInCA:
Clever repartee, there.
It is only the 2nd quarter of a 16 quarter administration. A lot of things were disrupted in the first quarter. But even now the fruits are starting to show. So a poll now is little more than academic. I remember when Reagan was much derided in the early days of his administration when the hard choices to crush inflation caused disruption, but by the end of his first term, it was Morning In America.
Whoopsie, deport violent gang members in the country illegally and things change for the better:
We could cut the crime rate to zero if we suspended the Constitution and sent everyone to prisons in foreign countries.
Wait…What? Donald Trump is doing that now?
@Mister Bluster: Ayup. Me too!
@Mimai: I absolutely agree. Approval of a politician doesn’t necessarily mean you’d vote for them (see: a lot of Democrats and Liz Cheney). And disapproval doesn’t necessarily mean you wouldn’t vote for the same politician again. Your questions actually ask about potential behavior, not just opinion.
@Mister Bluster:
JKB illustrates my point about value judgements and I actually find that transparency refreshing. At least with this commenter, I am able to suss that they weigh the “disruption” of shipping immigrants to a Salvadoran gulag without due process as well worth an unsubstantiated correlation with the “fruit” of violent crime reducing in one American city at a statistically significant higher rate than other US cities.
[They also suggest that being only ⅛ of the way through this dumpster fire should be reassuring somehow. I can’t even begin to fathom why that is.]
@Mimai: People lie about who they voted for, particularly when they no longer support the person they voted for. And if they do tell the truth there, a large number will then answer to be consistent, rather than show that they made a mistake,.
In a battle between ego and truth, ego will win fairly frequently.
Surely no one here would do that, but we are made of sterner stuff. Paragons of consistency and virtue, able to look at ourselves and our flaws without flinching.
The “who did you vote for in 2024?” question might be interesting, just to see how ashamed people are, and how that number fluctuates, but it’s not going to give useful data for telling who they voted for.
“Who would you vote for if the election was held today?” doesn’t make people say out loud that they were wrong. Provided you haven’t primed people first, by asking them who they voted for.
I think this is true: Some people do not tell the truth sometimes, and we don’t know for certain who or when.
I do not think it leads to: We cannot discern anything from their answers to questions.
Or leads to: We should give up on asking people questions.
I will also note that people are mighty selective in raising the “[other/those] people’s answers cannot be trusted” objection.
@Mimai: I think we have to be careful about what questions we ask them, and understand what the effect is.
Professional pollsters* put a lot of effort into either minimizing or maximizing this effect, depending on whether they are trying to get an accurate read, or whether they are using push polling to actual alter voter behaviors as a form of campaign advertising.
Just like the famous two slit electron experiment, observation changes the outcome. Only here is is more explicable than “I guess an electron can be a particle or a wave”
*:“professional” here means “was paid money and knows what they are doing” rather than being some judgement on whether they are reputable or ethical,
@Gustopher:
This is an excellent point. I would add that we also must be humble* about what we “understand” to be the effect.
*and rigorous and lots of other things
Back in 2016, knowing what I knew then about Trump, and seing him in action on the campaign trail and at the GOP convention, I thought that he would be a bad president, an awful choice.
— Well, I admit it, I was wrong, he was worse than bad.
The same holds true today with respect to the 2024 revenge and retribution tour. I thought he would obviously be much worse in his 2nd term, especially if he was given the keys to the entire government which he was.
–Again, I freely admit, he’s been worse than terrible. I did not expect him to initiate a trade war, go after Canada and Greenland, and with the exception of the UK, go after members of our NATO Alliance. Also it was incredible how swiftly nearly all opposition has caved in to Trump – prestigious law firms, prestigious universities, celebrity comedians and morning show hosts. All on bended knee.
The only surprise is that he has not yet … yet … sold out the Ukraine, but he’s been busy with his beloved tariffs. That time will inevitably come.
Three days ago:
Today:
So there’s no time to negotiate with them all, they’re just going to get a letter. But by golly they better hurry up and negotiate or they’ll get a letter!
A month ago, they were hammering at the door to do deals. Then Trump claimed he’d already done 200. Now Bessent expects them to ask for talks. He and Trump “think” this and that, as if they’re not sure who’s making the decisions.
They have no idea what they’re doing. None.
None of this is really surprising. I don’t think anyone not in the cult expected his numbers to go anywhere but down. It’s only surprising they haven’t gone down more, but that is probably coming and inevitable.