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The Trump Voters Who Are Losing Patience
Some of the president’s own voters are ready to blame him if their lives don’t improve soon.By Sarah Longwell
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
March 4, 2025, 4:45 PM ET
Donald Trump is president because, in the broadest possible sense, voters were unhappy with the direction of the country and wanted a change. The question now is whether what we’re seeing in Washington reflects the change they wanted.
Since January, I’ve conducted regular focus groups with voters across the political spectrum, asking them about Trump’s performance. Some patterns are starting to emerge. First: Lots of Trump voters believe they’re getting exactly what they signed up for—DOGE, disruption, someone shaking up Washington.
But Trump didn’t win with his base alone. Another significant group contributed to his margin of victory: people who voted for him because the change they wanted wasn’t systemic disruption but relief from the high cost of living they’ve been experiencing since the COVID lockdowns ended.
Read: The Trump backers who have buyer’s remorse
Voters in this group tend to be “soft” partisans or nonpartisan. They don’t follow politics closely and vote mostly based on things that affect their day-to-day lives—grocery and gas prices, rent, inflation. Many of these voters in the focus groups are showing signs that they do not believe that Trump’s policy priorities are about cheaper groceries. Instead, they see him getting distracted by culture-war issues that won’t actually improve their lives.
In his first term, a significant number of voters felt that Trump was a bad person who was good at managing the economy, which gave them a mixed view of him. But the past decade has functioned like exposure therapy for Trump: Many people have become desensitized to his character defects, so that what remains is the vague sense that “Trump = good economy.” These voters no longer look at his social-media posts, and they don’t read past headlines as they scroll. So his bad character—which hasn’t gone away—no longer registers.
But voters in this group are noticing that the job they elected him to do—fix the economy—is not getting done.
“ I would like to see him do a little bit more for the economy … because that was one of the platforms that he did run on, that he was going to help the economy,” Holly, a 2020 and 2024 Trump voter from Maine, said in a late-February focus group. (To protect participants’ privacy, we do not identify them by their last name.) “You know, we haven’t really seen that. My grocery prices are still the same, if not higher, than they were.”
“I wanted a lot of change as far as inflation and the price of everything,” Sharli, a Biden-to-Trump voter from Georgia, said in another focus group last month. “So I haven’t seen any real changes there. As a matter of fact, I think for me, things are worse, as far as the inflation.”
“I just worry about the tariffs making everything cost more. Looks like we might have to take some more pain before it gets better, as far as inflation,” Bobby, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said.
“ The first month has definitely been chaotic from what I’ve seen,” said Steven, a young 2024 Trump voter from New York. “For the general public, the first thing that we noticed were the prices on the eggs, and the memes going around talking about how getting somebody an egg is a delicacy now.”From where these people sit, Trump doesn’t look like he’s making much progress on fixing the economy. If anything, as Bobby suggested, the new tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China could hurt U.S. consumers. And the inflation rate has ticked up since late last year.
For these voters, what Trump seems to be doing instead are a bunch of crazy things that make his administration look distracted, chaotic, and ineffective. Things such as gutting the Federal Aviation Administration; firing—and quickly rehiring—nuclear scientists; installing an anti-vaccine conspiracist to steward America’s health systems; letting an unelected MAGA billionaire dismantle the federal government.
Now, it’s true that die-hard Trump fans love this stuff. They’re here for the liberal tears, and I’m confident that Trump will keep his sky-high approval ratings with the Republican base. But among voters who don’t identify as hard partisans, some are confused and downright worried about what’s happening. These are not members of the resistance. They’re all people who voted for Trump—many of them for the first time.
“ Firing the FAA director and then having, like, five plane crashes within a matter of, like, two weeks is literally insane,” a first-time Trump voter named Zackery said, referring to a pressure campaign that ended in the former FAA chief’s resignation in January. “Firing the people who handle nuclear weapons, and then realizing who you fired, and then having to be like, ‘Hey, hey, hey, don’t go, we need you’ … Like, that’s crazy.”
Hal, a young Trump 2024 voter from New Jersey, said: “ I’m not a huge fan of some claims that RFK has been making without any necessarily scientific backing or evidence.”
Bobby, the two-time Trump voter from Texas, said: “ As far as renaming the Gulf, stuff like that, or buying [Greenland] … I don’t know. It’s just kind of nonsense to me.”
Focus groups, of course, capture only part of the picture. But polls, too, are already showing a decline in Trump’s approval numbers, and discontent with Trump on the economy. A recent Reuters poll had him at 44 percent approval, down from 47 percent in January. Quinnipiac showed his disapproval rising from 43 percent to 49 percent over his first month. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that only 43 percent of Americans support his first-month policies, and that 53 percent disapprove of his handling of the economy.
Put the focus groups and the polling together and you start to understand the broader political environment: Some of Trump’s own voters are ready to blame him—just as they did former President Joe Biden—if their lives don’t improve, and soon. The next plane that goes down, the next elimination of an essential government function, the next kid who dies of measles—the administration will own all that.
The fan service Trump is doing for his base doesn’t get him anywhere with the people on the margins who helped put him in the White House, and who will determine the makeup of Congress in two years. Fixing what people think is wrong with the economy requires governing, something Trump has proved constitutionally incapable of doing. As we keep slogging through our daily politics, don’t be surprised to see Trump’s numbers continue to drop.
If that happens, the focus groups suggest that it won’t be because these voters gain any new appreciation for Democrats. It’ll be because Trump keeps shedding his own marginal supporters.
Presidents’ honeymoons tend to end in the summer of their first year. Biden’s ended during the Afghanistan pullout; Trump’s approval rating took a nosedive after Charlottesville; voters grew more critical of Barack Obama as the financial crisis lengthened. Perhaps summer is coming early for Trump this year.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...opy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
