“Saturday Night Live” this weekend featured one of its best political sketches in years. It’s about a mother who dramatically reveals to her children that she’s having sudden reservations about President Donald Trump.
If you haven’t, you should watch it.
And the satire has bipartisan bite. The right can enjoy the insufferable liberal adult children marring their mom’s moment of vulnerability with their apoplectic I-told-you-sos. The left can enjoy the caricature of someone they’ve long anticipated would one day arrive in droves: The regretful Trump voter, finally starting to come to her senses.
But how much does this mother reflect reality?
It certainly appears that more and more Trump voters are coming to a similarly skeptical place.
At the same time, it’s not clear how many of them were truly MAGA to begin with. And they generally express their emotions more subtly than the full-on regret that Trump’s critics have long sought.
A number of polls have gotten at this question in recent weeks.
A Pew Research Center poll, for one, suggested significant erosion in Trump’s support on the right.
The survey showed 20% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the Trump administration has been “worse than expected.”
Perhaps more strikingly, it showed the percentage of these voters who said they support “all” or “most” of Trump’s policies dropping from 67% in February 2025 to 56% in late January.
Fox News and New York Times-Siena College polls both recently broke out data on 2024 Trump voters, and the detractors were in many cases significant.
In the Fox poll, 16% of Trump voters said they disapproved of his job performance as president.
But it got worse from there. The survey also tested a dozen specific issues, and on 10 of the 12 – everything except border security and immigration – Trump’s disapproval rating among his 2024 voters was north of 20%. It was at least 25% on half of those issues.
That’s significant to have 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 Trump voters so consistently on a different page than the president.
The Times-Siena poll showed a slightly smaller 12% of 2024 Trump voters disapproving of his job performance overall.
But again, other data points were worse for him:
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17% of Trump voters described his first year back in office as “unsuccessful” (including 9% “very unsuccessful”).
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16% said Trump’s first year back has been worse than they expected.
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16% cited a negative emotion when asked to describe how they felt about it. (And just 72% offered an expressly positive one – compared to 92% of Harris voters who offered a negative one.)
What does all of that tell us? It suggests people might be understandably reluctant to say they disapprove of Trump when you asked for a straight up-or-down verdict. But the disapproval shows up more when you dig a little deeper and ask about specific things.
And that tracks with what we’ve seen before when it comes to the more specific subject of Trump voter “regret.”
We unfortunately don’t have good recent, high-quality data on Trump voter regret. The last survey to test this was an October Washington Post-Ipsos survey. It showed 7% of Trump voters said they regretted supporting Trump – compared to 3% of Kamala Harris supporters.
Seven percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a decent-sized chunk. And 19% of non-White Trump voters expressed regret.
The previous data also suggested these kinds of emotions could be building – slowly and subtly – even if they haven’t necessarily manifested themselves as full-on regret.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll, for instance, showed the percentage of Trump voters who were “very confident” in their 2024 vote dropping from 74% in April to 69% in August.
Only 1% said they regretted their vote, but about 3 in 10 had some kinds of reservations about it – ranging from “some regrets” (2%) and “mixed feelings” (6%) to remaining confident in their vote but having “some concerns” (19%).
The data suggest Trump voters could actually be underselling their overall disenchantment with him, to some degree. They might not be full-on regretful or disapproving, but they seem to be coming to certain realizations about what Trump is doing – a lot like the mother in the sketch.
But just like the mother in the sketch, they might be apprehensive about admitting that to those around them (or even to a pollster).
After all, nobody likes to admit they were wrong – especially when the other side is so annoying about it.
