A new poll suggests that the coalition that returned President Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year hiatus may be eroding.
These numbers come as Republicans seek to defend their narrow congressional majorities in November’s midterm elections, when replicating Trump’s 2024 support levels from low-propensity voters was always going to be a challenge.
Trump has lost ground with nonwhite and younger voters, according to a New York Times-Siena College poll released on Thursday. His gains with these voters compared to 2020 helped him win the popular vote and defeat former Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris is considering another run for president in 2028, though Trump is subject to term limits.
Of more immediate concern to the White House is the generic ballot question, which shows voters prefer Democrats to control Congress by a margin of 48% to 43%.
Trump denounced the poll as “FAKE” on social media, but the New York Times-Siena College poll generally showed him as competitive throughout the 2024 campaign and was one of the early public polls that captured former President Joe Biden’s weakness. Biden also dismissed the pollsters after Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections. The newspaper’s current finding on Trump’s job approval rating, sitting at 40%, isn’t terribly inconsistent with the RealClearPolitics average of 42.5%.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the Trump-induced realignment, in which the GOP becomes more of a multiracial, working-class party, is over, however.
As political analyst Ryan James Girdusky shows, the Democrats’ leads among key demographic groups still lag 2018 levels and, in some cases, 2020 levels.
Democrats won more than 40 House seats and the speakership in the 2018 midterm elections during Trump’s first term. That was the last true wave election, and it was a blue one. Biden was elected in 2020, but the battleground states were close, and Republicans actually gained House seats, though not the majority.
“These are good numbers for Democrats; there’s no denying that if the election were held today, they’d almost certainly win back the House of Representatives,” Girdusky writes. “However, these are not 2018 numbers in the crosstabs, not among Latinos, blacks, or young people.”
A significant advantage the Democrats have is that their part of the political realignment, the shift of college-educated white voters toward their party, has more or less already happened and withstood the shocks of the highest inflation in decades, the Biden border crisis, and the violent crime surge experienced in some major metropolitan areas. The 2024 Harris campaign, with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) as her running mate, leaned too heavily on these voters to the exclusion of everyone else.
The shift of culturally conservative and working-class nonwhites toward the Republicans is still in the process of happening. Some of these voters have reverted back to the Democrats as they give Trump low marks for his handling of the economy a year into his second term.
Maybe the part of the realignment that benefits Republicans could still be reversed. But if it remains contingent on a binary choice election, which presidential races typically are, rather than the referendum on the incumbent usually seen in midterm elections, Democrats haven’t really changed or moderated their cultural positions.
The past year has seen Trump heavily focused on foreign affairs, while voters have remained pessimistic about the economy and the cost of living.
Trump’s team appears to recognize the problem. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told reporters that the president would travel less internationally in the coming months as he ramps up for the midterm elections. “I’m going to be doing a lot of campaign traveling,” Trump confirmed on Air Force One the next day. Vice President JD Vance traveled to Minnesota on Thursday to defend the administration’s immigration enforcement and otherwise emphasize domestic issues.
Then again, Wiles made her remarks en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the dominant news story of the past week has been Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland.
Midterm elections are historically challenging for the party in power. But the Democrats rebounded from terrible midterm election results in 1994 and 2010 to win the next presidential election, and Republicans might have done the same after 2018 if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
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“Maybe 2024 was the ceiling for Republican support among specific demographics, but the floor is also much higher than it used to be,” Girdusky concludes.
Republicans will need to do a lot better to defy history this year, but the multiracial working-class party may not be over yet. Perhaps it hasn’t begun.
