A new poll shows that President Donald Trump is losing support among young “reluctant right” voters who elected him in 2024. According to a report in the Washington Examiner, only two in five of young voters who only voted for Trump because they didn’t like Kamala Harris say they are committed to voting Republican in the fast-approaching midterms.
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While 14 percent of that group says they will support only Democratic candidates, and 24 percent say they will vote for a mix of candidates, “many may well just stay home, said Stephen Hawkins, Global Director of Research for More in Common, a non-profit group that examines social faultlines,” explaining, “‘It’s not just, oh, he’s not doing as well as we thought he would be doing in terms of helping the economy turn around. It’s that there’s a sense it’s much worse than that, because the president is trying to distract from the Epstein scandal, and it’s coming at the expense of everyday Americans’ pocketbooks.’”
This shift has primarily been driven by younger Trump voters: “Overall, 11 percent of Gen Z and 8 percent of Millennial Trump voters say they will vote Democratic, compared with 3 percent of Gen X and Boomers.”
According to the Examiner, the Reluctant Right made up 20 percent of Trump’s electorate in 2024, describing them as “the most ambivalent cohort of Trump’s coalition, and the group most likely to have voted for Trump transactionally: the businessman who was ‘less bad’ than the alternative. Overall, the Reluctant Right gives Trump’s performance a rating of 52 out of 100. Compared with 93 for the MAGA Hardliners, 83 for Anti-Woke Conservatives, and 82 for Mainline Republicans.”
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This shift comes as Trump’s approval rating has cratered to historic lows and the MAGA movement has seen a string of high-profile defections. Last week, prominent conservative media figure Tucker Carlson announced that he was leaving the Republican Party altogether after months of speaking against Trump, who he had supported since the beginning of his movement, playing a key role in promoting his election in 2016. Similarly, former Representative and Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has made a dramatic exit from MAGA.
“The poll examined their impact on the coalition and found that they were not yet triggering a broader GOP defection,” said the Examiner. “Most Trump voters who have heard their criticism say it has not changed their views and some say it has actually made them more supportive of Trump.”
But according to Hawkins, these defections could be setting the stage for a rupture. As he explains, “What [Carlson is] doing is he’s undermining the sense that President Trump is on your side,” he said. “That was already weaker in the Reluctant Right. And he is giving voice to concerns that younger Republicans, younger conservatives have about President Trump to do with being too focused on personal projects, being involved in corruption, having to hide his Epstein affiliation by changing the subject to foreign policy, and then having a negative impact on prices in the economy.”
