Trump Is Losing White People, Rurals, Again, Some More
Gee that's sad.
Pollsters must be putting record amounts of effort into making up fake bad news about Donald Trump. That’s the only logical way to explain the latest Fox News poll of registered voters, which finds Trump’s job approval is down to just 39 percent, with disapproval at 61 percent. (Forty-eight percent of voters said they “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s performance.) Those are the lowest Fox Poll numbers of his second term, and they’re just one point above his lowest rating of all, in October 2017. Yes, this is a continuing trend in polling.
The poll even found Trump’s approval slipping among Republicans: It’s still absurdly high, at 80 percent (yeesh! It’s a cult!), but that’s three points down from last month, and an all-time low. (A friggin’ cult!) Among non-MAGA Republicans — both of them, we guess — Trump’s approval is at just 54 percent. His approval is also at record lows with white voters (43 percent) and rural voters (also 43 percent).
The low numbers are being driven, not surprisingly, by the 71 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Just 29 percent approve, down another five points since April. And probably some tiny percentage were mad that a “don’t know” option wasn’t available. Fox notes that the increase in disapproval was in part driven by “a 7-point rise in disapproval among Republicans.”
Trump’s economic rating among non-MAGA Republicans is only 36 percent, which is a lot closer to independents (18 percent) than to MAGA Republicans, 74 percent of whom have conned themselves into thinking Trump is doing just dandy on the economy. (Our guess: A lot of them may think the economy isn’t great, but they know that’s really Joe Biden’s fault, and Obama’s too, while Trump is heroically repairing everything. Or maybe they really do believe everything is fine.)
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Overall, 77 percent of respondents said the economy is in bad shape, and for once that extends into people’s assessment of how their own families are doing: “A slim majority of voters (51%) say their family’s finances are worse now than two years ago. Before the 2022 midterm elections, 44% said the same.”
Fox did not ask MAGA voters whether they think higher prices for everything is a good trade-off for not having to hear Kamala Harris laugh on TV.
On particular issues, “inflation” had the highest disapproval numbers, 74 percent, even worse than the 71 percent disapproval rate for “the economy” in general. Trump was actually underwater on all the issues Fox named. Sixty-two percent disapproved of his performance in foreign policy; 54 percent said they disapproved of how he handled the recent summit with China (though we bet not many could offer any specifics one way or the other); and even on what used to be his top issue, border security, 51 percent disapproved and 49 percent approved.
Predictably, the poll reflected the usual huge partisan gaps in the crosstabs breakdowns on those issues. On border security, a whopping 87 percent of Republicans approved of what Trump’s doing, while 85 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents disapproved.
The contrast was even sharper on foreign policy: 75 percent of Goopers approved, while 93 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independents disapproved.
But at least there was something closer to national unity on inflation: 91 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of independents said Trump’s performance sucks (OK, at least they “disapprove”). But even a slight majority of Republicans — 51 percent — also disapprove, possibly because even if you have an NRA decal and a “Trump 2028” bumper sticker on your huge pickup truck, it’s hard to ignore how much it costs to fill the tank.
Speaking of gas: Donald Trump makes stinky farts and everyone knows it.
But also, 86 percent of voters said rising gasoline prices are a problem; that includes 51 percent who called them a “major” problem. And a surprisingly sane 91 percent of respondents said Trump’s war on Iran is the chief cause of the price increases. We couldn’t actually find a breakdown of how many Trumpers think the Deep State is artificially inflating gas prices to force Americans to drive EVs, live in a pod, or eat bugs.
As for Trump’s stupid Iran war, the majority of voters (60 percent) continue to oppose it, which has been the case since Trump started the pointless debacle.
In fact, no major poll has found majority support for the fucking war in the months since it began, and by early this month a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll (gift link) found Trump’s idiot war was “as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.” In that poll, 61 percent said the decision to go to war was a mistake, and only 20 percent considered the war “a success.” Hey, congratulations on that little nod to history, Great Leader!
Back to a final result from the Fox News poll: When voters think about the long run under Trump, they are pretty damn worried: 57 percent said they think his policies will hurt America, only 34 percent said they’ll help, and 9 percent said Trump’s policies will make “no difference,” possibly because they’re also the kind of people who react to everything with “Well, it is what it is” and think that means they’re very smart realists.
The biggest takeaway for us is that while his MAGA chuds remain faithful and might never tire of him, the rest of the country keeps remembering why they rejected him in 2020, and for Crom’s sake, Democrats should be pounding that message at every opportunity, the end.
[Fox News / Poll crosstabs / WaPo (gift link)]
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