A woman places a MAGA hat on a man?s head while listening to Donald Trump Jr. speak during the AmericaFest 2024 conference sponsored by conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 19, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr
Sarah Burris is a long-time veteran of political campaigns, having worked as a fundraiser and media director across the United States. She transitioned into reporting while working for Rock the Vote, Future Majority and Wiretap Magazine, covering the Millennial Generation's perspective during the presidential elections. As a political writer, Burris has had bylines at CNN, Salon.com, BNR, and AlterNet and serves as a senior digital editor for RawStory.com.
A longtime Republican pollster said Thursday that people who voted for Donald Trump last year are already beginning to waver in their support.
Sarah Longwell has been doing focus groups of 2024 voters of Trump, tracking how attitudes are changing and why. The one thing she said is finally starting to "set in" for those voters is "maybe Donald Trump doesn't know exactly what he's doing."
She explained that the caveat is always the "hardcore MAGA people," who will never leave Trump. But another "major slice" of the coalition of people who helped elect Trump were "people who just wanted things to cost less."
Those voters, she said, were "upset about inflation" and "the cost of housing." So, they heard Donald Trump "promise to lower the price of groceries, and that he was going to lower the cost of everything. It was going to be so easy and so fast. And when you listen to voters in focus groups, they say not only are things not getting better, but it feels like they're getting worse."
"You get other people, especially people who are cost-constrained, who are at the lower end of the income spectrum, and those people notice every dollar and the way any price that goes up," said Longwell. "And, so, from those voters who heard the promise that Trump was going to lower costs, who thought he was a businessman, who knew what he was doing, and is now watching this chaos and not seeing their prices go down. They are starting to lose faith that he's going to be able to keep the promises that he made to them."