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Trump Support Negative Even Among White Working Class; Approval of His Agenda at Only 27%

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Trump’s poll results continue to fall. Since Trump watch Fox News regularly, its findings that even working class white voters are now disenchanted with him has likely penetrated his bubble. On top of that, other polls find that approval of his program stands at only 27%. Note that, as we’ll unpack soon, Trump’s approval ratings are higher than for his policies. This sort of disconnect is no

First from Washington Monthly, in Trump Is Losing the White Working-Class:

The latest poll from Fox News shows President Donald Trump’s job approval among white voters without college degrees is underwater: 49 percent approve, and 51 percent disapprove.

It’s just one pollster, and subgroup data has high margins of error. But working-class whites are the load-bearing pillar of the Republican Party’s MAGA era. Among all the race-and-education-level voter subgroups in the 2024 presidential election, non-college whites were the only ones who gave majority support to Trump. And not by a small amount, but by a nearly 2-1 margin. The Fox News data may not be precise—a new Pew Research Center poll has Trump’s approve-disapprove among non-college whites just slightly above water at 51-48—any softness among Trump’s most reliable bloc should send shivers down GOP spines.

Moreover, the Fox poll is not the only data point that warrants panic among Republicans. Trump’s relatively broad (winning 30 states) yet thin (with only 49 percent of the vote) 2024 victory was buoyed by inroads among people of color and voters under 30. I recently covered how, over the past year, as reflected in several polls and election returns, Trump and his party have frittered away those Latino gains. (The new Pew poll has Trump’s Hispanic approve-disapprove at an abysmal 26-71.) This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s approval rating among young voters, as measured by the Cook Political Report aggregates from the top of March to the top of January, has sunk about 8 points, from 44.4 to 32.6 percent.

The story points out that Trump approval was decaying even before the two ICE murders in Minneapolis, with law enforcement officers all over the US decrying both executions as unwarranted, as well as the bad look of Minneapolis police calling out unjustifiable ICE harassment of off-duty members for the crime of not being white.

Other takes:

Also keep in mind that this erosion in seeming opposition to the James Carville dictum, “It’s the economy, stupid.” GDP growth has been strong, as Trading Economics shows:

The stock market keeps hitting new highs. Despite scary headlines about some large layoffs at big employers, and the drumbeat of “AI is coming for your job,” jobless claims are moderate, headline unemployment at 4.4%, is tame, with experts depicting the labor market as “resilient”.

Of course, it’s not hard to depict the economic picture as “gloss is more than half empty” for most. Trump has realized that he can’t talk his way out of the affordability crisis, and has thrown out a hodge-podge of schemes, most of which wont’ get done and won’t make much difference even if they do. He’s punted on a train wreck coming for many household budgets, that of big increases in health insurance costs. particularly for former Obamacare enhanced subsidy recipients. And remember, these result are occurring even as the Administration is running the economy hot, with a $2 trillion deficit forecast for fiscal 2026

And in the “more inconvenient news” category:

Even with Twitter having a right wing skew, searching on “Trump economy” produced far more critical than positive tweets.

In his latest post. G. Elliott Morris discusses the gap between Trump’s falling approval ratings and the even-sorrier state of approval for Trump policies:

Pew is not the only pollster to find a difference between support for Trump in general and support for his policies. Earlier this month, CBS News found that 50% of adults say they approve of what Trump is “trying to accomplish” on immigration, while only 37% approve of “how he’s going about it” (a 13-point gap). YouGov this week found the same pattern: 51% say they support Trump’s goals on immigration policy, but only 27% support both the goals and his implementation (a 24-point gap)….

Across polls, there is a notable difference between what Americans say they support in general and what they support in practice. Historically, political scientists have noticed a similar gap between an individual’s “symbolic” and “operational” ideology.

Let’s stop for a second because this is a key issue. We have pointed out repeatedly that polls show anywhere from big majority to at the worst solid plurality support for all sorts of policies misleadingly labeled as left wing, from strengthening Social Security and Medicare to taxing the rich to cutting military spending to spending more on education. Yet many of those respondents will identify themselves as centrist or even conservative despite holding “progressive” stances on all the big issues in a “progressive” platform.

Morris confirms this tendency:

Christopher Ellis and James Stimso..in their 2012 book Ideology in America…find Americans like the idea of limited government, law and order, traditional values, etc. But when you ask about specific programs and policies, they generally want the government to do more, not less, and lean more to the left than the right.

In other words, decades of libererian/neoliberal propaganda penetrated, as the moving forces behind the Powell Memorandum sought. Later in Morris’ post:

To be clear, there is utility in being the party with a symbolic edge on the issues. A new poll from Reuters/Ipsos found this week that 37% of adults prefer Republicans on immigration, vs. 32% for Democrats, even while Trump’s immigration enforcement policies are severely unpopular.

But when voters encounter a policy they don’t approve of in the real world, that provides an opportunity for the other party to reduce their advantage.

On immigration, it was obvious from early in Trump’s presidency that his unpopular policies would drag down his approval and trust metrics over time. Every video of dozens of agents swarming an apartment building, every citizen wrongly detained or legal resident wrongly deported, every lie about a shooting caught on camera reinforces the reality of an issue.

And this has been the reality for Trump since 2015. As soon as he implements a policy from his campaign, voters balk. Americans like the idea of Trump’s agenda more than the reality of it. The border wall was exciting until it meant seizing ranchers’ land. “Drain the swamp” resonated until it meant firing inspectors general. “America First” sounded strong until allies started hedging and supply chains fractured.

This is the fundamental paradox of Trumpism: it is a governing philosophy built entirely on symbols, confronting a world that runs on policy. Trump won in 2024 not because Americans wanted what he was selling, but because voters wanted what they thought he was selling — lower prices, a “secure border,” a harm-free return for manufacturing jobs.

But you can’t govern on vibes forever. Eventually, you have to implement policies. And when the policies are significantly less popular than the symbols, the average Trump voter discovers they were never really on board with MAGA after all.

Another factor to keep in mind: this sharp and continuing slide in approval is coming despite Trump’s frenetic shifts from one big splashy attention-grabbing gambit to the next, from Caracas to Greenland to Iran to threatening Powell with criminal charges to his latest fights with universities and the science establishment to his Peace Board grift. These distraction and exhaustion efforts are not arresting the decay in his support. To the extent that US voter care, they may be making it worse:

It may be that Trump is incapable of checking his intense need to dominate, and made sure to surround himself with toadies and enablers. Or it may simply be, as Trump clearly said in a New York Times interview, that he believe there are no limits to his power, and he is in the process of clearing obstacles to his authoritarian rule. The test will be whether we have midterm elections.

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3 comments

  1. Mike

    It seems it does not matter, even to the 2025 group. They are speeding along to get their agenda fixed in stone before the gas escapes the balloon. This is an example that we don’t have a President, but a consultancy focus and capital mafia projecting it.

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  2. ISL

    Another possibility is that voters support the policy goals but are concerned that the actual program goals (to implement the policy) differ from the advertised goals.

    Is the point of Trump’s immigration policy the introduction of an El Salvadoran solution – a federal, immunized, loyal, paramilitary force, with immigration a side feature?

    —
    first paragraph, last sentence just drops off, and I can’t suss where it was going….

    Reply ↓
  3. JM

    Seems there was an editing error, the first paragraph ends abruptly with “This sort of disconnect is no”. I assume it was going to say that individuals tended to poll higher than policy, so that there’s a disconnect isn’t a surprise, but the scale and speed of change may be?

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