Crucial swing voters 'no longer fooled' by Trump — and Republicans are worried
Although Donald Trump's victory over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the United States' 2024 presidential election wasn't the "landslide" he claims it was — Trump won the national popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent — his gains with everyone from Latinos to Generation Z to independents got him past the finish line. 2024 marked Trump's fourth presidential campaign and the first time he won the popular vote, and his victory came despite the fact that he was facing four criminal indictments at the time.
The economy was a key factor in Trump's gains with independents and swing voters. But with fears about the health of the U.S. economy growing, Trump is, according to polls, losing ground with them.
In a conversation for The New Republic's "The Daily Blast" podcast posted on November 26, host Greg Sargent (a former Washington Post columnist) and his colleague Monica Potts lay out some reasons why Trump's gains with swing voters and independents are rapidly disappearing ten months into his second presidency. And those reasons range from health care to the economy to foreign policy.
Potts said of health insurance, "We had the lowest uninsured rate in the history of the United States in 2023…. It was the point of the Affordable Care Act…. to get as many people in this country insured as possible to move us toward universal health care. And Republicans let those enhanced subsidies expire. And what's happened as a result of that is that insurers have increased their premium rates. So right now, as we speak, people who buy health care on the insurance marketplaces are looking at the costs for next year, and they're seeing premiums for the same plans go up."
Potts added, "Some people are seeing really dramatic increases…. For other people, it’s increases of thousands of dollars for their family coverage. And some people are deciding to opt out and not buy insurance."
Trump, Potts noted, ran "on affordability issues" in 2024 — and now, "affordability" is a key source of anxiety for the independents and swing voters who favored him last year.
"Energy bills are expensive," Potts told Sargent. "The labor market is not very good right now. People feel stuck in their jobs. They feel like they're not making enough. They feel like they can't move forward. And so, people aren't very optimistic right now. And I think that all the things that Trump is doing are really making it worse to a huge degree…. I think that one thing to keep in mind, which is something I always try to remember, is that most people just do not pay that much attention to the ins and outs of politics or every single thing that every president does. And so, you know, in a lot of people's minds, Trump was still a successful businessman — and they had a, maybe a false memory or they had a kind of a rosy memory of the economy before COVID and they thought, well, things were better then. And he's a businessman — maybe he can get us out of this mess because (Joe) Biden had the bad luck to serve for four years that included a really weird post-COVID-era and high inflation."
Potts continued, "And so, I think that some people just thought, 'Well, he's a businessman, he can bring us jobs, he can straighten out the economy. Without thinking too much more about it. And so, I think that there were some voters who voted for Trump for that reason, and they’re no longer fooled. They can see now what's happening."
Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link or read the transcript here.