The voters who powered Donald Trump back into the White House are increasingly unable to explain why they did it — and pollsters who sit in on focus groups say the war in Iran is what finally broke the spell.
Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster who worked on Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign, told The New York Times that the turn against the president picked up speed once he launched the war. Working-class voters who had backed Trump were "at a loss for words" when asked to justify the move, she said, particularly as gas prices climbed and they felt the cost in their own budgets.
Murphy called the moment a "watershed" — a decade into Trump's grip on American politics, his own supporters openly reckoning with the idea that he was never the person they thought he was.
The disillusionment is showing up in the data. Times' analysis found that white voters without college degrees, who broke for Trump better than two to one in 2024, have swung hard against him on the economy. Where they once approved of his economic record by 30 points or more, recent polls show them disapproving by double digits. On the cost of living, just 36 percent told the Times they approved.
For Democratic operatives who spend their days hunting for disillusioned Trump voters to feature in campaign ads, the search has gotten noticeably less difficult.
Eva Kemp, a strategist with the Democratic group American Bridge, told the paper that finding those voters has "gotten easier," and that their disappointment now feels more raw and more personal. Women, she said, have run out of patience fastest. In one recent focus group of working-class white voters in Iowa, she recounted, nearly all of the women handed Trump a grade of D or F. The men graded him more gently. Republican strategists, granted anonymity to discuss their party's weak spots, told the Times they were seeing the same gender split.
Tim Spencer, a 72-year-old retired tool and die maker from Pella, Iowa, who voted for Trump, told the paper that filling his Chevy pickup now runs about $140, up from $90. The camping trips he and his wife once took across the Midwest have shrunk to the borders of his own state.
Carl Wallnau, a 35-year-old outside Fort Worth who backed Trump on his promise to lower gas prices, said those promises simply never materialized. He now plans to vote third party in 2026, according to the report.
"I'm reminded of Bill Clinton," Wallnau told the Times. "It's the economy, stupid."