New survey data show that many of Donald Trump’s 2024 working-class voters are already wavering. But most aren’t turning to Democrats — they’re dropping out of politics altogether.
By Jared Abbott & Joan C. Williams, Jacobin
Many commentators have repeatedly sounded the alarm about declining working-class support for the Democratic Party in 2024, particularly among non-white working-class voters. Those concerns remain real and are part of a decades-long dealignment of working-class voters from the party once seen as their natural home. But Donald Trump’s erratic, vindictive, and economically damaging first year in office has already given many of those same voters buyer’s remorse.
Trump’s 2024 victory was built on a narrative of attracting a multiracial working-class coalition of black and Latino voters united by frustration with the Biden administration’s perceived failures on inflation, the cost of living, and immigration. That narrative is already falling apart.
A recent survey we conducted of 1,940 2024 Trump voters (oversampling working-class black and Latino voters) shows the 2024 Republican coalition fracturing: 20.1 percent of Trump voters — more than one in five — are not currently planning to vote Republican in 2028. We define these “waverers” as Trump 2024 voters who (at least right now) do not plan to vote Republican in 2028. And they are disproportionately poor, non-white, and working-class. These are the very groups whose support was supposed to signal that Republicans had successfully consolidated a working-class majority.
The “Switchers” Are Switching Back
Our most dramatic finding concerns voters who moved from Joe Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024. These were the crown jewels of the Republican election night story, supposed final proof that Republicans had achieved their decade-long dream of a multiracial working-class realignment. But 57 percent of these Biden-to-Trump switchers say they do not plan to vote for the Republican presidential nominee in 2028.
Many Biden-to-Trump switchers were never MAGA converts. They were cross-pressured moderates and independents who gave Trump a shot out of frustration with the Democrats. Seventy percent do not identify as Republican (compared to just 16 percent of respondents who remain loyal to Trump), and 44 percent call themselves moderate (compared to just 15 percent of Trump loyalists). These voters were not signing up for MAGA, they were registering their frustration with Biden and the Democrats.
The class dynamics of wavering Trump voters are particularly telling. Trump’s support has eroded most sharply at the bottom of the income ladder: 31.3 percent of Trump voters earning less than $15,000 a year are wavering, compared to just 12.7 percent of those earning over $200,000. The same pattern holds for education: Trump voters without a high school diploma waver at 31.8 percent, while just 17.6 percent of those with a four-year college degree reported that they don’t plan to vote Republican in 2028.
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