A new survey offers some novel insight into Trump’s corroding coalition.
The survey, which I (Abbott) conducted with the scholar and author Joan C Williams, sampled about 1,940 Trump voters and captured the attitudes of the broad coalition that brought Trump to the White House in 2024. Respondents were asked if they intended to vote Republican in the 2028 presidential election and, in particular, their views on immigration – Trump’s strongest issue.
The results paint a bleak picture for Republicans (but not necessarily a rosy one for the Democrats). The survey finds that approximately 20% of 2024 Trump voters may not vote Republican in 2028, and that almost 57% of voters who switched from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 are considering abandoning the Republican party in 2028. Many among the much-talked-about group of voters that gave him the edge he needed to win the popular vote – working-class, blue-collar voters and lower-income moderates – are now on the fence.
The bulk of the now-uncertain Trump voters come from the lower end of the class hierarchy. About 31% of the lowest-income 2024 Trump voters are wavering in their support. Compare that to just 12.7% of those earning more than $200,000. We see a weaker, though still clear, pattern when it comes to education. While 31.8% of Trump voters without a high school diploma and 20% with less than a college education are wavering, that number drops to 17.6% among those with at least a four-year college degree.
Put simply, Trump’s coalition is most stable at the top and most fragile at the bottom.
It’s not hard to see why. These working-class voters (many of them self-identified moderates, former Democrats, and even some self-described liberals) took a gamble on Trump hoping he would deliver them from an economic squeeze and restore some sense of social peace. One year on, he has not done so, and worse than that, he’s introduced a lot more chaos.
Take immigration, Trump’s signature issue. Many blue-collar voters were frustrated by the Biden administration’s handling of the border – and not without reason. There is good evidence that the surge of immigration under Biden’s watch tempered wage growth among workers in construction, manufacturing, and other labor-intensive sectors.
At the same time, few workers who voted for Trump out of frustration with Biden and the Democrats thought they were signing up for masked ICE agents abducting peaceable residents without any semblance of due process or gunning down law-abiding American citizens in the streets.
To wit, our new survey results show that while only 13.5% of wavering Trump voters say they prefer Joe Biden’s immigration policies over Trump’s, a whopping 50% of these voters think Trump has gone too far on immigration, while just 31.4% believe he has not. Here is a great example of the way that neither party’s preferred policy position really speaks to the needs and interests of many working-class voters. And it’s one reason why, despite the bad news for Trump, the math doesn’t add up to good results for Democrats.
Indeed, though about 20% of Trump’s 2024 supporters, concentrated among his working-class voters, are now having second thoughts, the vast majority of those haven’t been won over by the Democrats either. Just 3.4% of Trump 2024 waverers plan to vote blue in 2028, while the lion’s share are undecided, thinking of a third party, or just planning to sit it out altogether.
Here is a wake-up call. Trump’s working-class base is eroding, but they won’t be won over by smug I-told-you-so’s and the bad, old liberal habit of talking down to voters, of scoffing at their values, or denying their economic concerns. Only a real full-throated populism, one that takes seriously these voters’ concerns about globalization, the cost of living and the corrosive power of the elite, can win them back.
Trump’s coalition is there for the taking, for any populist brave enough to listen to the working class.
Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623
