President Trump, you’ve been warned.
Ron Brownstein: “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.”
“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.”
In both polls, non‑college White voters give Trump significantly higher approval than the national average, but not overwhelming support; their approval and disapproval shares are near parity rather than lopsided in either direction.
Opinion: Trump won the 2024 election for one reason only—the cost of living. While most of the electorate have opinions on nearly all of the issues, a significant portion vote on their wallets. They are large enough to tip the balance of a presidential election, and, for them, the price of goods, job security, and health care take precedence over everything else.
And these folks tend to be blue collar and without an advanced education—Trump’s core supporters.
“I think that is undeniable,” he said. “It’s [affordability] the number one issue among the swing voter electorate,” conservative pollster Patrick Ruffini recently told Politico.
“[If] you want to define the swing voter electorate in 2024, cost of living was far and away the number one issue among the Biden-to-Trump voters in 2024. It is still the number one issue. And that’s because of demographically who they are. The profile of the voter who swung in ‘24 was not just minority, but young, low-income, who tends to be less college-educated, less married and more exposed to affordability concerns.
“…The core Democratic voter is concerned about the erosion of norms and democracy. The core Republican voter is concerned about immigration and border security. But this swing vote is very, very much concerned about the cost of living.”
“… What really matters is this cost-of-living issue, which people don’t view as having been solved by Trump coming into office. The White House would say—and Vance said recently—that it takes a while to turn the Titanic around.”
What about ICE’s controversial actions?
“I would say the ICE actions are probably a bit negative,” Ruffini recently told Politico. “But I think Latino voters primarily share the same concerns as other voters in the electorate. They’re primarily focused on cost of living, jobs, and health care.”
If you ask, “What is MAGA economic policy?”, for many, MAGA economic policy is tariffs—and in many ways, tariffs run up against an impulse to do something about affordability. Now, to date, we haven’t really seen that actually play out. We haven’t really seen an increase in the inflation rate, which is good. But there’s an opportunity cost to focusing on certain issues over this focus on affordability.”
The stronger critique of Trump’s economic approach is not merely that he failed to confront the cost-of-living crisis, but that he actively pursued policies at odds with his professed economic populism. Chief among them were the tax cuts—marketed with a few populist flourishes, yet fundamentally structured as a deeply regressive overhaul that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy.
“I’ve always said that we are headed towards a future where these groups are up for grabs, and whichever party captures them has the advantage,” Ruffini recently told Politico.
“That’s different from the politics of the Obama era, where we were talking about an emerging Democratic majority driven by a generational shift and by the rise of non-white voters in the electorate.”
“The most recent New York Times poll has Democrats ahead among Latino voters by 16 points, which is certainly different than 2024, when Trump lost them by just single digits, but that is a far cry from where we were in 2016 and 2018. So I think in many respects, that version of it is coming true. But if 2024 was a best-case scenario for the right, and 2026 is a worst-case scenario, we really have to wait till 2028 to see where this all shakes out.”
