Ronald Brownstein: Trump's base is tiring of him at a bad time

Cracks are opening in the foundation of President Donald Trump’s coalition: working-class White voters. That could be crucial in November’s midterm elections. For Democrats, improving their performance among those voters is the key to expanding their map of opportunities in both the House and Senate.

Since emerging as the GOP’s leader in 2016, Trump’s hold on working-class White voters — often defined as White adults without a four-year college degree — has been almost impregnable. These voters have leaned right since the social upheavals of the late 1960s. But even against that backdrop, Trump has impressively widened the Republican Party’s advantage, winning about two-thirds of non-college White voters in all three of his presidential races, according to the exit polls. That was the strongest showing with these voters for any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide victory in 1984.

But now Trump’s blue-collar advantage is fraying. National polls released last week by the Pew Research Center and Fox News Channel each showed these non-college White voters dividing almost exactly 50-50 on whether they approved or disapproved of his job performance as president.

That put an exclamation point on a procession of polls earlier in January that also found Trump’s approval rating among working-class White adults dipping well below his commanding 2024 vote totals, usually somewhere between the low- to mid-50s. (Other key groups that moved toward Trump in 2024 — college-educated White voters, voters of color and young voters — have all cooled on the president already.)

Long the nation’s biggest single voting bloc, White adults without a college degree have been steadily shrinking as a share of the electorate since the 1960s, as American society becomes both better-educated and more racially diverse. Nationally, they cast about 37% of all votes in the 2024 election, according to Census figures analyzed by demographer William Frey.

But this group looms larger in the 2026 battlegrounds. In the 10 Senate races that both sides consider most competitive, non-college Whites exceed their national share of the vote in eight states — and do so significantly in six of them, Frey found.

These voters are likewise crucial to Democratic hopes in the House. The share of Whites without a college degree exceeds the national average in 25 of the 37 Republican-held seats targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to a demographic analysis of House districts that Carolyn Silverman and I conducted last year. That includes multiple seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Florida.

The principal reason Trump’s position has eroded with this demographic is the economy. The new Fox poll found that 55% of working-class White adults disapproved of his handling of the economy and 59% gave him bad marks for managing inflation; other surveys have found that more of these voters think his policies have hurt than helped the economy and raised, not lowered, costs. Polls have consistently found these voters are especially sour on his health-care record, including the large Medicaid cuts in last year’s GOP budget.

Immigration, by contrast, has been among his best issues with these voters, who lean conservative on almost all social issues. But even here, doubts are starting to creep in. Although they still give Trump enthusiastic grades for his handling of the border, their assessment of his mass deportation drive has cooled as violent confrontations with immigrants, U.S. citizens and protesters have grown. Multiple recent polls have found half or more non-college Whites believe that the administration’s tactics have gone too far; in YouGov polling last week, a solid plurality of them said Alex Pretti’s shooting was not justified.

Across these surveys, White women without a college degree are almost always somewhat cooler toward Trump than men. That’s an especially telling signal. Those women have often been slightly more open to voting for Democrats, particularly around issues relating to the social safety net.

After Trump and congressional Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, Democrats ran a few points better with these women in the 2018 House races than they did in any other House election immediately before or since, according to the exit polls. That proved a decisive difference in several races.

The rub for Democrats is that for all their growing doubts about Trump, working-class White voters remain deeply skeptical of the Democratic Party. For instance, the latest Wall Street Journal survey found that White people without a four-year degree still trusted Republicans over Democrats to handle the economy by two to one, and to deal with immigration by an even larger margin.

A massive research project one Democratic group launched to study blue-collar voters concluded last fall that “Working-class voters perceive Democrats to be woke, weak, and out-of-touch, too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact everyone, every day.” Those negative perceptions may limit Democrats’ ability to win over these voters.

Nevertheless, the biggest factor in any midterm is the popularity of the incumbent president — not the popularity of the opposition party. Whatever they thought about Democrats in 2020, 94% of non-college Whites who disapproved of Trump voted Democratic in the House elections that year, the exit polls found. Democrats’ problem then was that Trump’s disapproval rating among blue-collar Whites stood at just 34%. But today, it’s between 41% (in early January) and 51% (more recently). That history suggests that, despite all the doubts White working-class voters hold about Democrats, if Trump’s disapproval rating among them is higher in 2026 than it was in his first term, the Democratic vote in congressional elections will increase, too.

There is, of course, time for Trump to recover before November. But barring some dramatic change of course by the president, the polling is clear. The number of White working-class voters who rebuke Trump will likely make the difference between whether the election is a good night for Democrats, or a great one.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.

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