Tariffs. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. National Guard deployments. The Epstein files. Strikes on Iran. Gaza and Ukraine. Sticky inflation. The first year of President Donald Trump’s time in office has been a firehose of unpopular policies, confrontational tactics, and frequent clashes with his perceived enemies.
Each of these developments has tended to trigger the same question: Will any of this matter to the voters who made up his winning coalition in 2024? Will he bleed support, fracture his coalition, and doom future Republicans? Or was 2024 a more durable realignment in American politics?
The answer isn’t as clear-cut as headlines often make it out to be. There has been some slippage in support among Trump’s 2024 voting coalition, but it’s not the GOP doomsday scenario some headlines have tended to make it out to be (for example, saying that the coalition has “fallen apart”).
Similar cases were made after Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, after American strikes on Iran, after the Epstein files took over headlines, and as Trump began to enforce his immigration policies and carry out deportations. Yet, through it all, this summer and entering fall, his popularity and approval ratings have remained steady — negative, historically low, but still not a complete collapse.
So, what can we tell about the state of Trump’s 2024 coalition? At least three things:
Level setting: Trump’s coalition is still primarily behind him
It’s important to be clear about what we mean when we talk about Trump’s coalition. It includes the loyal MAGA base: primarily white, rural, and non-college educated. And it includes a broad swath of new voters that gave him the margins to narrowly win the popular vote and battleground states: young and nonwhite voters, specifically young men, and former Democrats who were disgruntled with the establishment and status quo. These newer Trump voters weren’t hardcore conservatives or loyal Republicans, but they were disengaged, dissatisfied, and desired change.
Almost a year later, the majority of this coalition still stands by Trump. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll, one of the most useful tools we have available, finds little change in how people feel about the president today when compared to four months ago. From April to September, Trump’s share of support has held steady at about 42 to 43 percent.
In other words, some 40 percent of the country approves of Trump’s presidency through every controversy and pronouncement, while a slight majority continuously disapproves. That approving minority includes more than nine in 10 Republicans, a little under a third of Hispanic voters, and about half of voters over the age of 45.
Yet there are clear signs of bleeding, if not total collapse
Still, the data we have available shows that not all is well. By looking at both presidential approval ratings, generic congressional ballot polling, and economic sentiment, a clear picture emerges of dropping support among young people and Latino voters because of sour economic vibes.
“He has lost more ground among the people he gained the most ground with last year — young people and Hispanics,” Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the publication Strength in Numbers, told me. By Morris’s estimates, there’s been about a 30 percentage point swing in approval among these voters away from Trump when compared to his margins of victory — meaning something is shifting among this segment of the electorate.
The NYT/Siena poll captures some of this, too. Trump’s youth support is shockingly low. Only 30 percent approve of him, compared to the 66 percent who disapprove. His Latino support is similar: Only 26 percent approve, and 69 percent disapprove. Those numbers stand in stark contrast to Trump’s 2024 performance, when he nearly won young and Latino voters outright last year.
Comparing generic congressional ballot polling also shows a shift of these voters away from Republicans toward Democrats, Lakshya Jain, the head of political data at The Argument, told me. “Where are Democrats gaining the most with voters right now compared to where they stood in 2024? The thing you’re consistently seeing is [gains] with young voters [and] Hispanics,” Jain said.
Morris estimates this generic ballot shift among both groups at about 10 points away from Republicans — not as dramatic as the approval figures, but still significant.
And the reasons for this drop-off, Morris and Jain both tell me, are primarily economic and incumbent-related. These voters who swung to Trump in 2024 were most sensitive to economic conditions — to inflation, to price hikes, to affordability — and continue to feel negatively about the economy today.
“It’s the economy. Perceptions are negative, people are unhappy, and people think Trump is not focusing the most on the economy,” Jain said.
In 2024, Trump benefited from being on the outside; disgruntled voters had the option of rejecting the status quo by voting for him. This year, Morris told me, they don’t have that option. Their frustration is manifesting as disapproval of Trump.
“A lot of these voters didn’t vote for Donald Trump because he was Donald Trump, but because of the economy,” Morris said. “This apparent shifting of these groups away from Trump is less of a political statement about Trump and more of a reaction to underlying economic conditions. In other words, they are not really pro-Trump or anti-Trump — they are anti-status quo.”
This is the longer-term danger for the GOP. Many voters in the Trump coalition were upset enough to vote against the Democratic incumbents of 2024 — but if they remain dissatisfied, Republicans might not be able to count on them come 2026.
Correction, October 7, 5:45 pm: This story originally misstated the most recent youth approval rate for President Donald Trump; it was at 30 percent in a September NYT/Siena poll.
