Trump's approval rating is falling fastest with the coalition that propelled him to the White House
Trump's net approval among young and nonwhite voters is dropping at a much faster pace than other groups
Many people have written about the unique coalition that helped President Donald Trump win the White House in 2024: I think at this point it’s indisputable that remarkable GOP gains among younger and nonwhite voters pushed Trump over the finish line. But after last night’s election results, and seeing the huge rebound among Hispanic voters for the Democratic Party, I thought it might be a good time to check in on how these voters are feeling about the president one year on from the 2024 election. And it seems to me that had more people been paying attention to the trends among these groups, Tuesday’s results may not have been a surprise.
First, let’s take a look at Trump’s approval rating by race.
While it may be hard to see with all the dots on the graph, if you hover over each racial category individually, it’s fairly clear that the rate of decline among nonwhite Americans (both Black and Hispanic) has eclipsed that among white voters. Indeed, the coefficient for the linear trend for Black respondents is -0.1, for Hispanic respondents is -0.08, and for white respondents is -0.04.1 And if those coefficients don’t mean much to you, consider this: if you compare the average net approval in the first 7 days of Trump’s presidency to the last 7 days, he’s fallen about 15 points with white Americans, but 57 points with Black Americans and 26 points with Hispanic or Latino Americans.
The dramatic difference in the rate of Trump’s decline is even more clear when we consider the age breakdown.
The rate of decline among the youngest cohort of Americans is clearly visible here. When we consider the coefficients for the line of best fit, we have among 18-29 year olds, a coefficient of -0.12; among 30-44, a coefficient of -0.05; among 45-64, a coefficient of -0.05; and among 65 or older, a coefficient of -0.03. And again, comparing the first week of Trump’s presidency to the most recent week yields a fairly stark picture.
In the first week of his presidency, Trump was above water in net approval among all age cohorts considered. He even performed better with the youngest voters, at an average of +10 net approval, than among voters aged 65 and up (average +3 net approval). But that has changed dramatically; his average in polls conducted in the latest week has dropped 41 points among voters aged 18-29, to -31 net approval, compared with a drop of just 12 points among voters aged 65 and up.
I don’t really have any grand conclusions to draw here that are more important than the impact we saw on Tuesday of this lapse in support among Trump’s new GOP coalition. It’s clear that the Republican Party should not rely on these voters, but as we saw in 2024, neither I think can the Democratic Party assume that these voters are back in their camp for good. I think the real lesson is that we may be witnessing the birth of a new group of swing voters, and both parties will have their work cut out for them to win them over in the future.
Since crosstabs are notoriously very noisy, I chose a linear trend rather than a moving average that can be easily impacted by outliers in a fairly sparse dataset, or require significant manipulation/smoothing/etc. to look like anything.
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