President Donald Trump has become remarkably unpopular with voters across the board since his return to the White House, and according to a USA Today report, he is also “losing his grip” more and more over a critical voting bloc that has backed the GOP for generations.
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In a recent episode of USA Today’s The Excerpt podcast, host Dana Taylor noted that “Trump has long counted on white working-class and rural voters as one of the most reliable parts of his political base,” but they are now beginning to drift away from him, driven by “frustrations over the economy, healthcare, immigration, and the cost of living.” Reporter Chris Kenning appeared as a guest to discuss the potential fallout of these voters feeling burned by Trump, but also “not necessarily ready to become Democrats.”
“That has been a really important group for a long time,” Kenning explained. “And in 2024, two out of three white working-class voters backed him according to some exit polling. And he also won nearly 70 percent of the rural vote that year according to some of that same exit polling. Some people were drawn to vows to kind of reboot the economy post-COVID through bringing back manufacturing and industries like coal and cracking down on illegal immigration.”
He continued: “But it’s been interesting because there’s been a series of polling from a lot of different organizations in recent months that has really shown that disapproval has started to rise among those groups, including reaching some slight majorities. And most of that seems to be driven by economic concerns, but you had a CBS poll in May that found 54 percent of white non-college voters disapproved of his performance, and that was up from 32% in February of 2025. Among rural voters, you had a June Reuters poll that found 48 percent disapproved of Trump, and that was up from 34 percent after he took office. So it’s a significant shift that we’ve seen.”
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In speaking with voters about their dissatisfaction with Trump, Kenning said that “pocketbook issues” relating to the economy were the “big one” for most of them. Rising gas prices thanks to the war with Iran were one of the biggest pain points, given that people see them every day while driving around, with rising grocery prices also being a leading factor. Housing costs and medical insurance were some of the other affordability issues that voters mentioned, as they felt the impact of Trump’s policies “close to home.”
All of this distress puts Trump and the GOP in an even worse position than they were in 2018, when they suffered bruising midterm losses to the Democrats.
“[It’s] typical that a president’s party loses seats in the midterm elections,” Kenning added. “I think during Trump’s first term, the GOP lost 41 seats in the House but retained the Senate. But in 2018, working-class voters still approved of Trump’s economic management by a much bigger margin than they do now. So how that plays out is yet to be seen, but we’ve seen that some polling suggesting that more people among this group say that they’re willing to consider voting for a Democrat, which is still under half, but it’s up from the 2018 midterm. So we could see a change. But I think some of the experts I talked to, as you mentioned the stickiness, it’s not necessarily that they believe a lot of people are going to suddenly vote Democrat who’ve been voting Republican. It may just be that people stay home and that could cut into the GOP efforts to maintain their majorities.”
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