Voters who flipped at the last election to vote for Donald Trump and the Republican Party believe one issue is dragging his administration down.
Despite action in Greenland and Venezuela, the ongoing release of Jeffrey Epstein's files, and a narrowly avoided healthcare crisis, it's the economy that has people turning away from the president. Voters who were polled by the New York Times say the cost-of-living crisis is the main reason they are not satisfied with the president.
Analysis from Nate Cohn suggests voters who flipped to vote for Trump have now lost trust in his economic promises from the campaign trail.
He wrote, "The economy was one of the biggest reasons these same voters flipped to supporting Mr. Trump in the first place. In the last campaign, these voters disapproved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy, said it was the most important issue, and said they thought Mr. Trump would handle the issue well. Today, all of those conditions have flipped, and these voters have as well.
"...Over our last two polls, the voters who have soured on Mr. Trump — those who say they voted for him in 2024 but disapprove of him today — have been likeliest to cite an economic issue as the biggest problem facing the country: 44 percent of the Trump defectors cite economic issues, compared with just 24 percent of other voters."
Cohn went on to suggest there were other issues driving voters away also, such as the use of ICE across the country and backlash to Trump's comments on Truth Social. But the driving issue, polling shows, is the economy.
"To be sure, all of those other issues — including the new ones, like ICE’s conduct in Minneapolis or Mr. Trump’s threats against Greenland — contribute to the president’s political problems," Cohn wrote, adding "just as immigration or the backlash against 'woke' contributed to Mr. Biden’s unpopularity and Kamala Harris’s defeat.
"About half of today’s defectors from Mr. Trump cited something other than the economy as the most important problem facing the country. Many of those issues — democracy, polarization or even Mr. Trump himself — reflect deep concern about his actions among an electorally decisive sliver of voters who backed him in the last election."
Analysis of the polling results went on to suggest the "same forces are dragging down" Trump as those experienced by the Biden administration.