Americans Are Turning on Trump

With the Felon having been documented to have told in the neighborhood of 30,000 lies during his first occupancy of the White House, I still find it baffling that many young voters, Hispanics and even blacks voted for the Felon apparently believing his 2024 campaign lies.  It should have been obvious to anyone who had paid attention to his first term would have believed him in 2024. Whether voter opposition to a black woman as president, Joe Biden's late exit from the race  or other dynamics were at work, we may never know. Now, polls are show huge levels of buyer's remorse among voters who in my view foolishly believed the Felon.  Instead of lowering prices "on day one" the Felon's tariffs, war of choice with Iran, and slashing of social programs have fueled more inflation that shows no signs of abating anytime soon, especially as a peace deal with Iran appears elusive. The Felon, of course, lies that his poll numbers are very high outside of "fake news" outlets, that a peace deal with Iran is close, and that "affordability" is a Democrat hoax. A piece at The Atlantic looks at Americans' souring view of the Felon and the losses of support among demographics who foolishly voted for the Felon in 2024.  Here are article excerpts:

Fundamental realignments in the way Americans vote are rare, but predictions that they have occurred are not. Nearly as soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential race in November 2024, people started saying the election represented a new era. “Trump just realigned the entire political map. Democrats have ‘no easy path’ to fix it,” announced NBC News.

The election had been very close. Trump won slightly more electoral votes than Joe Biden had in 2020 (312 to 306), but he also won fewer total popular votes and a smaller percentage of the vote. This was still significant because it was the first time in three tries that Trump had captured a plurality of the electorate, but the case for realignment hinged less on raw numbers than on demographic breakdowns. The Republican Party had strengthened its grip on the white working class and had done historically well with young voters—young men in particular—and Hispanic voters. Writing in The Atlantic in May 2025, the pollster Patrick Ruffini argued that a new era of politics had dawned, in which Trump had broken Democrats’ solid grip on minority voters.

The Democratic Party’s problems remain very real, but for the moment, Trump and the GOP have more serious ones. The most glaring one is Trump’s deep personal unpopularity. In the current polarized and dyspeptic political environment, all presidents seem to be unpopular, but Trump is in a different league. A CNN poll released last week measured Trump at 34 percent support, matching the low he reached in that poll following the January 6 insurrection. Still, that was better than his showing in the AP-NORC survey, which found his approval at 33 percent, just one point above a 2017 low. Quinnipiac University found Trump at 32 percent, the lowest ever in that poll. . . . . digging into polling results shows particular deterioration with the particular groups that were supposed to be at the center of the Trump 2024 realignment.

Consider young voters. Kamala Harris won a slim majority of them in 2024, a huge drop from the 25 percent margin that Biden enjoyed four years earlier. The Yale Youth Poll found in May that 68 percent of voters ages 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters ages 23 to 29 disapproved of Trump. Echelon Insights also found that younger voters disapprove of Trump more than the general population—the number has fallen 37 percent since the start of this administration.

One reason Trump’s numbers have sunk so much among young people is his poor performance among young men. A popular explanation was that a feminized, woke Democratic Party had driven them away and into the arms of Trump and a growing manosphere of influencers. To the extent that that was true, it was ephemeral. These voters are still wary of the Democrats, but they’ve soured on Trump as well. The Yale Youth Poll found that men under 30 were one of the two groups that had turned the most against Trump since last fall.

Trump is also bleeding support among Black and Hispanic voters, and especially men, as Bloomberg Government reports. In 2024, Trump won almost half of Hispanic voters, but polls show Republicans drawing 27 to 35 percent support in the midterms, which would be their worst performance with the group since the Democratic-wave year of 2018. . . . A May poll found that a quarter of Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 wouldn’t do so again.

The decay has even reached Trump’s core supporters. A New York Times review of polling data found in June that white working-class voters’ views of the president’s handling of the economy were tanking. During the first two years of his first term, these voters rated him higher than the overall population; now they rate him much worse.

Echelon finds his approval down to 41 percent among those with a high-school education or less. Polling from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism finds a shrinking Trump base and less personal connection to Trump, which is a particular problem for a personalist leader and movement. Republican strategists are now worried that even consistent GOP voters might not turn out in November, according to The Washington Post.

[S]everal convincing explanations existed for Trump’s 2024 victory that didn’t involve realignment, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, global anti-incumbent sentiment, and the peculiar dynamics of Biden’s ill-advised decision to run and his late exit from the race. But the foremost was inflation. Americans were angry at the Democratic Party because of persistently higher prices. Now Trump is losing support for the same reason. Not only has Trump not ended inflation, as he promised—in June, it ran at 3.5 percent—but his decisions, especially the Iran war, have driven prices higher. Voters were willing to give Trump a chance because of their disgust with Biden. Now they’re seeing the results, and they don’t like them.

Although some observers believed a sea change had occurred, the Brookings Institution scholar (and Atlantic contributor) Jonathan Rauch concluded on November 9, 2024, that the result did not represent “a pro-MAGA realignment or a sweeping repudiation of Democrats. Rather, this was an ordinary election.” He added, prophetically, “While the Republicans undoubtedly scored a clear victory, they may be tempted to claim a stronger mandate than the voters intended to deliver—and they may respond with policies that are more extreme and disruptive than the public wants or expects.” Now the realignment looks nearly as moribund as GOP chances in the midterms.