The second Trump administration started off with a bang: riding the high of 2024’s historic levels of new multiracial and working class support, bullying law firms and universities, flinging out executive orders and DOGE restructurings like nobody’s business. A Republican-controlled Congress was ready to implement President Donald Trump’s agenda, and his deportation and tariff policies were about to roll out.
If you fast-forward to today, however, the vibes are very different.
Whether it concerns his management of the economy or his program of mass deportation, each day seems to bring more evidence that Trump’s 2024 coalition is disintegrating. Meanwhile, Trump’s biggest supporters in the online influencer space and commentariat are either at war with each other or less than thrilled about him. Voters, for their part, have consistently registered their anger at the GOP, in elections from New Jersey to Tennessee.
It’s clear, in other words, that Trump’s 2024 coalition is fraying. What is less clear is exactly why. What I found in my reporting, though, suggests that while the ultimate answer may still be beyond our reach, there are three broad theories that have taken hold among pollsters, politicos, and others with a professional focus on this central question in American politics. The three theories are as follows:
- The low-propensity voters theory, which holds that the collapse in Trump’s approval and support is mostly a natural byproduct of the kind of anti-politics voters that he won so convincingly in 2024.
- The affordability voters theory, which holds that Trump is suffering most with the kind of people who prioritized the economy and affordability above other things.
- The “new entrant” GOP voters theory, which holds that there’s a distinct subset of the Republican coalition that is primarily younger and more progressive but nevertheless voted for Trump last year.
While these three explanations are hardly mutually exclusive, a lot hinges on which theory Republicans conclude best explains their recent political struggles — if they acknowledge they have a problem, that is.
If they believe their fortunes are riding on low-propensity voters, for example, they may be more likely to try different media or campaign messaging, pull back on tariffs, or try to appeal to more college-educated voters to right the ship. If they believe in the new entrant theory, on the other hand, it’s possible they might try to wade into the online debates over the future of the right, or try to moderate some social positions instead. Democratic strategists will, of course, be drawing their own conclusions, too. And the answers both parties reach could have a major influence on US politics in the years to come.
The low-propensity voter theory
Patrick Ruffini, a founding partner at the research firm Echelon Insights, is a longtime Republican Party pollster and strategist, as well as the author of Party of the People, a 2023 book that, I admit, was remarkably prescient about what would happen in the 2024 election.
As much as there are worrying signs for Republicans, I found one statistic about affordability voters that really jumped out to me, and should be worrying Democrats. Democrats are lagging tremendously in winning over support of white affordability voters: While 77 percent of nonwhite affordability voters disapprove of Trump and 73 percent prefer Democrats, 48 percent of these white voters disapprove but only 40 percent prefer Democrats.
That big gap suggests white, moderate, and conservative affordability voters aren’t sold on Democrats yet.
More recently, however, Ruffini has been criticizing the narrative that there is a MAGA crack-up happening at all, arguing that much of the recent intra-GOP squabbling (between Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example) is an elite fixation: “The media and influencer discourse can be pretty disconnected from the voter reality,” he said on a recent New York Times podcast. “If MAGA were really cracking up, you’d see it in the polls. In our polling, Trump has been above or near a 95 percent approval rating among supporters since he took office in January.”
Instead, Ruffini argues, the drop in Trump’s support is being fueled by independent, low-propensity voters who voted for Trump in 2024 but, generally, are less connected to politics, younger, and more racially diverse. These people, Ruffini argues, aren’t keeping track of the news, don’t care for most of the big “scandals” of the era, and are only ambiently hearing or feeling the effects of the Trump administration.
This “low-propensity theory of everything” as Ruffini calls it, explains why Trump’s approval has shifted so much: As swing independents, so swings the top-line number. This is why young voters have been swinging back and forth so much over the last few years: Because they don’t have strong partisan ties, their politics are still forming and changing, and they just don’t seem to care that much about what’s happening around them. You can therefore imagine a whole segment of the electorate, beyond just young voters, who don’t really have a strong allegiance to one party or another, feeling dissatisfied and annoyed at the status quo, and thus swinging away from the incumbent party.
“People were so shocked at young voters swinging to the right and then swinging to the left again,” Lakshya Jain, the elections analyst and head of data at The Argument, told Vox. “But this is a group that is extremely disengaged in politics and has the lowest income relative to other groups in society. Obviously, the economy being bad means they’re going to get pushed away.”
These “low-propensity” and low information voters used to vote for Democrats at higher rates, but have begun to occupy a bigger subset of the Trump electorate, meaning any swings are probably going to look bigger than before.
The affordability voter theory
But as Jain points out, these swingy voters aren’t swinging over nothing. It’s all about the economy. And that’s where a second theory, which Jain argues for, is helpful to layer on top: that Trump is specifically losing the most support among a cohort of 2024 voters who prioritized affordability above everything else.
Some of the split in the Trump coalition potentially transcends partisanship, likeliness of voting, or news engagement.
In polling that Jain conducted for The Argument, he found that Democrats are gaining, and Trump is losing, specifically among nonwhite voters, voters under the age of 45, and among non-college educated voters. This makes the potential blue wave of 2026 look like the inverse of the 2018 blue wave, where Democrats made huge gains with white, older, and college-educated voters.
Underlying these shifts is one thing: affordability. A full 60 percent of respondents in the latest Argument poll rank cost of living as one their top two most important issues. “Nothing else even came close,” Jain says. “What’s more, it’s clear voters absolutely detest the way Trump is handling it.”
By his estimate, these “cost-of-living as a top-2 issue” voters have swung from supporting Trump by a six-point margin last year to disapproving of him by a 13 point-margin, a bigger swing than any other kind of voter.
Poll after poll shows this: Republicans themselves are increasingly dissatisfied with the state of the economy, and are torn over how much to blame Trump for this. Some of the split in the Trump coalition, therefore, potentially transcends partisanship, likeliness of voting, or news engagement. Voters who are paying attention to current events are paying attention to the state of the economy, and report overwhelmingly negative feelings over rising costs of groceries, housing, utilities, and health care.
This also explains the large swings among Latino and young voters we’ve seen over the last few months: Many of these voters opted for voting for Trump at higher rates last year as one-off, trusting him to actually improve their economic conditions. This doesn’t seem to be happening, and they are paying attention, so they’re swinging toward Democrats.
“In 2024, Trump had promised a group of disillusioned young people that he would continue to tear everything down, but he isn’t rebuilding in a way that’s improving their quality of life,” Rachel Janfaza, a writer and analyst focused on Gen Z, told Vox. “We know that the top issues for young people are affordability, housing, and economic concerns. They’re very stressed about AI, they’re being told it’s coming for their life, their jobs, their futures. And yet they aren’t seeing him talk about it. Instead, he’s calling affordability a con job.”
Janfaza doesn’t fully agree with Ruffini and Jain’s description of “low-propensity” voters: “The young people I speak to are very well aware of what’s happening. They don’t mince words. They’re very nuanced on the topics. They’re disappointed, they’re frustrated.”
But she does buy the description of these voters as being particularly swingy over the economy. She also noted that this might mean that they run to the Democratic Party and turn out for Democrats next year, but cautioned that this shouldn’t be taken as evidence that they have returned to the progressive and liberal bona fides of previous cohorts of young voters.
The idiosyncratic, “new entrants” to the GOP
The third theory comes from the conservative Manhattan Institute’s recent study of the Republican electorate.
The 2024 coalition is not a durable, lasting one — much like Democrats discovered after the Obama era, segments of it can, and are, shifting.
They divide up the Trump coalition into two parts: Two-thirds belong to the “Core Republican” identity — these are consistently conservative Republican voters who embrace the traditional tenets of MAGA and conservative politics. Then there’s the idiosyncratic mix of “New Entrants” — about 30 percent of the coalition — which holds political opinions that clash with the MAGA-fied majority of GOP voters.
“They are younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past,” Jesse Arm, the author of the Manhattan Institute study, writes.
Arm notes that these “New Entrants” are less conservative than “core” Republicans on just about every policy issue: backing abortion rights, a more pro-immigrant policy agenda, and more progressive social views. A majority do not support Trump’s tariffs. They are also more open to believing conspiracy theories, especially those concerning Israel and Jewish people, and more willing to justify political violence. They are more likely to have voted for a Democratic candidate before, and have lower approval ratings for Republican figures than the “core” group.
“They’re disgruntled Obama-to-Trump or Biden-to-Trump voters whose politics are all over the map,” Arm says. “The racist in your X mentions who thinks the moon landing was faked and that George Bush arranged 9/11 is just as likely to want higher taxes and abortion-on-demand as he is to support eradicating DEI bureaucracies or doing anything to rein in the welfare state.”
Crucially, there are overlaps between this category and the last two: These are also voters who are probably less informed or engaged in politics, who cared about affordability, who are younger, who are more likely to be Black or Latino, and who are new Republican voters. And crucially for the future of our politics, this segment of voters is much less likely to vote for another Republican candidate in the future, per Arm. The survey finds that while 70 percent of Core Republicans would “definitely” vote for a GOP candidate in 2026, only 56 percent of the New Entrants would.
But taken together, this shows the stakes of Trump and his party holding together a winning coalition. The 2024 coalition is not a durable, lasting one — much like Democrats discovered after the Obama era, segments of it can, and are, shifting. And actions that Republicans take, whether in substance or in message, to try to win back or hold support from any one of these types of voters could endanger their support from the other two types. That’s assuming, of course, that low-propensity voters don’t simply disengage from politics completely.
Of course, first Trump has to admit that voter discontent is real, and probably not give himself an A++++ rating for his stewardship of the economy. That might be the first obstacle GOP strategists must overcome as they attempt to chart their party’s future.
