PHILADELPHIA — In September 2024, Sharita White made a desperate choice. After supporting Democrats in previous presidential election cycles, the 37-year-old Black Philadelphian decided she would cast her ballot for Donald Trump.
Her life during the Biden years had taken a frustrating turn: Her husband had passed away, she’d lost her job, and she was forced to move with her kids to a Philly neighborhood notorious for crime and fentanyl addiction. With a son struggling with a chronic ailment, her tight food budget had been padded by pandemic stimulus checks. With those gone, and high inflation pushing up the cost of living, life felt drastically different.
“When Trump was in the chair, Black people was up. And I want Trump back in the chair because I’ve been struggling ever since he’s been out of the chair,” she told me and Today, Explained producer Miles Bryan last fall in front of a cheesesteak shop where Republican operatives were campaigning for Black voters.
When November came, she joined millions of other Black, Latino, and young voters who broke with Democrats and cast their votes for Trump. Voters like Sharita White — disengaged, historically Democratic, and frustrated with the status quo — powered a historic red shift in Democratic strongholds across the country, helping Trump sweep Electoral College battlegrounds and win the popular vote.
But eight months later, White told us she feels even worse. “I just see things just keep rising and stuff, and things does not look like they’re getting better and stuff,” she said when we caught up with her at her Northeast Philly home in May. “Because at this point, it’s like nothing is getting better. And the economy is getting worse.”
She regrets her vote for Trump. And she’s not alone.
Across a range of polling averages and survey data, a similar picture is developing. Black, Latino, and young voters are turning sharply against him, reversing the gains he made throughout 2024 with traditionally Democratic voting groups.
Trump created a multiracial, working-class, Republican coalition. But just three and a half months into this presidency, that coalition looks like it’s falling apart.
The data shows a steady drift away from Trump among his 2024 coalition
Trump was elected president in no small part because his campaign’s unconventional wager paid off. His team bet that by focusing on the economy, inflation, and immigration — and by bringing that message to non-traditional media platforms and to places where Republicans typically struggle — they might activate a coalition of the disaffected.
It worked in November. But now, his perceived inability to deliver on this seems to be fueling the great unraveling of this coalition. Trump’s overall job approval and personal favorability ratings have steadily dropped, largely because voters disapprove of and distrust his handling of the economy.
When Trump took office, he, and his agenda, had more support than in his first term. But voters wanted him to mainly focus on the economy, and more specifically, on inflation.
By March, the public mood began to turn. Views of the economy, and Trump’s stewardship of it, began to sour. Many voters, including those who joined his coalition in November, told pollsters that Trump was focusing on the wrong things. And when he announced his Liberation Day tariff scheme, jolting the stock market and threatening to raise prices, he seemed to lock in that sense.
That’s why, since the start of his term, Trump has seen the sharpest drops in his job approval ratings among those cohorts of voters who swung hard for him in November: Latino voters (a roughly 13 percent drop), Black voters (a 9 percent drop), young voters (-23 percent), independents (-18), and moderates (-15), according to polls aggregated and analyzed by the former political pollster Adam Carlson.
Low-engagement voters — those people who don’t pay a lot of attention to the news — swung hard for Trump in November. Now, they have similarly soured on Trump, swinging more than 30 points away from him since January, according to another set of averages calculated by the data journalist G. Elliott Morris.
And the least MAGA, less ideological Trump voters who turned out for him last year are also much more likely to disapprove of Trump today than they were in February. According to the most recent Pew Research Center study, Trump’s standing among his voters who did not support him strongly has fallen by about 13 percentage points over the last three months. His support among his most enthusiastic supporters, meanwhile, has stayed steady — essentially unchanged at 96 percent (it was 99 percent in February).
These trends suggest real dissatisfaction among the electorate in general, but specifically a sharp shift among the newest members of the Republican coalition. They took a bet on Trump, believed his promises about making life more affordable and moderating perceived policy excesses of the Biden years, and feel duped, betrayed, or let down by an administration that seems to be taking a much more radical approach to their campaign promises than they expected.
And these voters aren’t hard to find.
Some Trump voters feel betrayed by their presidential pick
That sense of betrayal and confusion is palpable in the diverse places that swung hard for Trump last year. In North Philly, Jose, a 61-year-old retired Dominican American man who said he was a Democratic voter until last year, told us he feels like Trump’s presidency so far has been a stab in the back.
Jose told us that Trump’s economic pitch was more promising than the Biden years of Democratic governance. He flagged his frustrations with Biden’s immigration policy, saying that Democrats “forgot that — here — they had people who needed work here too,” and instead let immigrants into the country and “let them take jobs from Americans.”
He had believed Trump would better wrangle inflation, while also enforcing immigration laws and deporting violent criminals. Jose said he’s instead getting an administration that’s forcing price hikes through trade wars, while rounding up nonviolent, hard-working immigrants.
“We voted for Trump and Trump betrayed us,” he said. “The truth is people voted for one thing: the economy. A good economy. And these tariffs are hiking everything up… And he’s kicking out hard workers and not touching the people who don’t work, he’s leaving them. How does that make sense?”
Young, first-time Trump voters on college campuses told us something similar: perhaps they did agree with Trump’s restrictionist stance on immigration; perhaps they did believe the government should be better with how it spends money and how federal grants are given out. But as they prepared to enter the job market after college, they were worried about affordability and job stability.
“I expected things to be a little different,” Nikita, a senior at Drexel University who voted for Trump, told us. “I’m just hoping for the future and hopefully some of these tariffs soon come to pass, as maybe just like a temporary thing.” He was supportive of Trump’s border policies, but was anxious about the job and stock market. “He became president, but [the stock market] … doesn’t look good as of right now.”
Trump’s losses aren’t necessarily Democratic gains
Talking with voters like Sharita White in the Kensington neighborhood, it’s clear why so many voters last year were willing to give Trump another try. This part of the city, in the northeast, saw a spike in poverty, crime, and homelessness in the post-pandemic years. Drug use and dealing is a near-constant presence.
And it also continued a trend in blue, Democratic cities, as multiracial and working-class neighborhoods continued to swing right. At this point, some number of voters have now, at different times, put their hopes in candidates of both major parties. But life doesn’t seem to have changed for the better.
That’s why, while talking to these voters, we heard a parallel emotion to their frustration with Trump. They’re second-guessing their 2024 vote choices, but they don’t necessarily say they would have swapped their vote for Kamala Harris. And they don’t say they plan to vote Democratic in the future — or declare that Republicans have completely lost them either.
Some Philly residents told us they’re still trusting the process. Nikita, and other college students we talked to, said they’re willing to give Trump more time before turning on him completely. They like some of what he’s doing, and think he can still get back on track.
Other first-time Trump voters said they wished they’d sat out the election entirely and plan to do so again. White, for example, said the last few cycles have made her lose faith in politics completely. “I’m going to be honest. I’m tired. I feel like at this point, my vote don’t matter,” she said. “It’s like, I can’t do nothing to change anything. There was a time that Black people couldn’t vote. There was the time women couldn’t vote…but I feel like my vote don’t matter.”
White’s story, and those of the other disaffected Trump voters we talked to, should be a warning for both parties. Republicans stand to give up the gains they made last year and lose an opportunity to build a lasting, winning coalition, aided by national trends that are making voters of color and young voters less likely to stand by the Democratic Party.
But particularly ahead of midterm elections, when Democrats will have anti-incumbent energy on their side, it’s possible for the party to misread Trump backlash as Democratic support. The same data that show soft Trump voters fleeing him also suggests that they aren’t running back to the Democrats. Congressional Democrats, for example, are still struggling with a toxic brand name: they’re running nearly even with Republicans in head-to-head polling, while one recent poll found only about 30 percent of voters view the Democratic Party favorably. And the party in general still hasn’t fixed its communication problem, of reaching the kinds of voters Trump was able to reach last year.
Both parties have time to fix these problems before the next presidential election. But if 2024 showed anything, it’s that these voters have the numbers and power to swing entire elections.
Miles Bryan contributed reporting to this story.
