Trump’s wanton destruction of the economy damaging his standing among his critical constituency of low-information voters

Donald Trump has many obvious political liabilities, which causes too many people to assume that beating him is an easy task. The problem is that he also has some unique political strengths, most notably his ability to mobilize sporadic and first-time voters. The latter does have a downside, though, which is that if things get objectively worse you can’t propagandize your way out of it:

In the 2024 election, Donald Trump gained a surprising edge from an unlikely group: Americans who typically don’t vote. According to a New York Times analysis, these low-turnout voters backed Trump by a double-digit margin, flipping the script from prior years when non-voters leaned Democratic. This wasn’t just a quirk of the horse-race polls; Campaign operatives, analysts, and post-election surveys all pointed to the same conclusion: The less you followed politics, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.

But now that he’s president again, something’s shifted.

New polling shows that the very voters who powered Trump’s return to office are now abandoning him. And if that trend holds, it could upend assumptions about how much campaign messaging and elite discourse really matter. Because it turns out the people who don’t read the Times, don’t watch the Sunday shows, and don’t care about the policy details… still care when the economy sours and their lives get harder.

This is the story of the disengaged voter: why they showed up for Trump, why they’re turning on him now, and what that tells us about political accountability in the era of the “engagement gap.”

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Of course, the economic conditions that led to Trump’s victory are no longer the conditions Americans find themselves in. Conditions are much worse today. But if we think these voters are more reactive to economic conditions, and less sensitive to messaging on things like immigration and budget cuts, would that mean this bloc is actually anti-Trump now?

That seems to be the case. According to polls, opt-out voters are moving more against Trump than informed, engaged ones, and significantly disapprove of the job he’s doing as president. According to two Pew Research Center surveys, for example, in February, 44% of 2024 non-voters approved of the job Trump was doing. By April, just 31% of them approved — a 13 percentage point decline. That was larger than the 7-point decline Trump picked up among all adults, and the same size as the drop in Trump support among people who say they only somewhat strongly supported him in 2024:

Another one of Trump’s edges, his ability to mobilize/persuade young men of color, especially Hispanic voters, seems to be diminishing:

The surge in support from Hispanic voters that helped power Trump to victory has waned since he took office, with his approval rating among Latinos falling 3 percentage points to 34% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week, amid concerns about the economy and the president’s hardline approach to immigration.

Trump’s disapproval ratings among Hispanic voters reached 61%, up 7 percentage points, compared with a 5 point increase among Americans overall, to 53%.

Trump won 46% of the Hispanic vote in November’s election, 14 points higher than in 2020, according to Edison Research exit polls.

While Democrat Kamala Harris won a larger share of the Hispanic vote, Trump performed better than any Republican presidential candidate since the 1970s, according to exit poll data compiled by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Some cracks are appearing in Trump’s coalition of supporters.

While Gonzales, the Navy veteran, supports tougher border controls, he admitted to reservations about the deportations of some people without judicial review.

“It should be open-faced, so we should be able to see what is going on and that it’s not secretive,” he said.

I continue to think that the assertion that Democrats should just ignore Trump’s lawless kidnappings and deportations because “immigration” is his best issue is misguided. Some of that support is based on the idea that Trump just wants to deport the violent criminals that President Joe Brandon personally invited to come into the country through the completely open borders. Illustrations that this isn’t true can help to mitigate his big edge, and that’s a problem for Republicans since they’re not going to want to run on destroying Medicaid for another round of upper-class tax cuts.