The latest poll from Fox News shows President Donald Trump’s job approval among white voters without college degrees is underwater: 49 percent approve, and 51 percent disapprove.
It’s just one pollster, and subgroup data has high margins of error. But working-class whites are the load-bearing pillar of the Republican Party’s MAGA era. Among all the race-and-education-level voter subgroups in the 2024 presidential election, non-college whites were the only ones who gave majority support to Trump. And not by a small amount, but by a nearly 2-1 margin. The Fox News data may not be precise—a new Pew Research Center poll has Trump’s approve-disapprove among non-college whites just slightly above water at 51-48—any softness among Trump’s most reliable bloc should send shivers down GOP spines.
Moreover, the Fox poll is not the only data point that warrants panic among Republicans. Trump’s relatively broad (winning 30 states) yet thin (with only 49 percent of the vote) 2024 victory was buoyed by inroads among people of color and voters under 30. I recently covered how, over the past year, as reflected in several polls and election returns, Trump and his party have frittered away those Latino gains. (The new Pew poll has Trump’s Hispanic approve-disapprove at an abysmal 26-71.) This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s approval rating among young voters, as measured by the Cook Political Report aggregates from the top of March to the top of January, has sunk about 8 points, from 44.4 to 32.6 percent.
This erosion of support was showing up in the data before the two January homicides of protesters perpetrated by federal immigration agents during Trump’s mass deportation effort in Minneapolis, dubbed Operation Metro Surge. (The second homicide occurred on January 24, and the Fox News poll was sampled from January 23 to 26. However, a November Fox News poll also pegged Trump’s approval among non-college whites to be underwater.)
Are the bonds of the MAGA coalition further threatened by the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti? Clearly, Trump thinks so. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have backed away from his initial defiance, wouldn’t have reassigned Greg Bovino, Operation Metro Surge’s commander, and wouldn’t have said he plans to “de-escalate a little bit”—all examples of the rarest of Trump moves: the tacit acknowledgement of fault.
While many Trump loyalists furiously exploited blurry video of Good’s homicide to suggest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who pulled the trigger was in danger of being run over by Good (ignoring clearer video from other angles showing the contrary), careful frame-by-frame video analysis of the Pretti shooting providing an indisputable rebuttal of hasty claims of Pretti’s culpability from Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, leaving loyalists without spinnable material. Any libertarian who opposes the use of force by the federal government on American citizens exercising their First Amendment and (in the case of Pretti) Second Amendment rights would be horrified.
The political question regarding the durability of MAGA is: Are there enough libertarian purists in the MAGA coalition who would bolt after recognizing that Trump and his diehards are their authoritarians? Or is their hatred of Democratic mainstream liberals and the rising democratic socialist faction too intense to consider abandoning the Republicans?
Thirty years ago, conservative movement organizer Grover Norquist sought to reshape the Republican Party for the post-Cold War era. In a January 1996 address hosted by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College, Norquist defined elements of the emerging Republican coalition and what bound them: “They all want to be left alone by the government.”
This “Leave Us Alone” coalition is made up of taxpayers who oppose higher taxes and farmers and property owners who don’t want the federal government making their property useless by declaring it a wetland or endangered species habitat or by inventing some other regulation. The coalition also includes Westerners who resent being treated as a colony and having their water and land rationed by eastern bureaucrats. The 17 million small businessmen and women who fear taxes and regulation, the self-employed attacked by regulations and labor laws written for General Motors in the 1940s, and gun owners who do not want their guns stolen have joined as well. And the “Leave us Alone” coalition provides a haven for the one million parents who educate their children at home and the 12 percent of parents who send their children to private schools.
During the Cold War, Americans who were rightly concerned about the threat of Soviet imperialism were a strong part of the “Leave Us Alone” coalition. They wanted to be left alone from foreign aggression. Today, Americans with the same concern about predatory criminals are also part of the coalition … They also know that the Left’s solution to crime, which is gun control, mirrors its belief that unilateral arms control was the proper response to the Red Army.
Norquist had to perform some contortions to make the Leave Us Alone branding work. He left out that Bill Clinton’s Democrats, as part of their solution to crime, provided funding for 100,000 additional police officers. He didn’t include women who needed reproductive freedom, or gays who needed the right to marry, work, and serve in the military, in the groups deserving to be left alone by the government. But he did put in the effort to bring together disparate groups—going beyond traditional conservatives to incorporate more moderate suburban swing voters—under a banner of principle that would last beyond a single election or presidential administration. And that coalition largely held together until the Iraq War, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, and the Great Recession wrecked Republican credibility.
Trump largely reassembled Norquist’s coalition of the working-class, small business owners, gun carriers, private school and homeschool parents, and crime-fearing voters without any veneer of overarching principle. He has held it together by relentlessly self-promoting a cult of personality (“I alone can fix it,” he declared at his 2016 convention) and manufacturing culture wars against an array of caricatured enemies, including immigrants, protesters, vaccinators, transgender athletes, socialists, and communists.
His MAGA coalition was always shaky. He’s never won 50 percent of the popular vote. He’s never been able to hold the coalition together in successive elections, an indictment of his ability to deliver satisfying results while in power.
When Trump was out of power in 2024, as noted above, he did make inroads with people of color and young people, primarily men. (According to data from Catalyst, compared to 2020, Trump improved 11 points among Latino men, 10 points among men under 30, and eight points among Black men. He improved seven points among Latinas but gained no ground with Black or white women.) Now back in power, he has failed to deliver on his promise to reduce the cost of living, partly because he is obsessed with tariffs. And his fixation on mass deportation proved far more disruptive—to be charitable—than advertised. Voters still bought into the cult of personality, or are still fearful that Trump’s collection of boogeymen will remain in the fold. But anyone with a higher sense of principle or who demands more immediate economic relief is probably heading for the exit.
Before the Minneapolis homicides, the drop in Trump’s job approval polling, and the edge Democrats have in generic congressional ballot polling can be plausibly attributed to economic dissatisfaction. Do the homicides—which, as I chronicled earlier this week, exemplify Trump’s longstanding support for militant authoritarian tactics for self-serving ends—rattle other members of the MAGA coalition who had convinced themselves Trump was committed to higher principles of personal freedom?
We can’t say for sure yet, though the recent comments from MAGA-friendly podcast kingpin Joe Rogan provide some insight. After the killing of Good, Rogan conveyed to the very libertarian-minded Senator Rand Paul his discomfort with the entire Operation Metro Surge operation: “You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people, many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them. Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” He also called Good’s death a “terrible tragedy.”
After Pretti’s death, Rogan concluded, “I don’t feel like that guy should have been shot.” But he also expounded at great length that federal agents are often put in difficult situations because of “a coordinated effort to cause chaos” on the left, so “everybody forgets about the fraud” in Minnesota’s social service agencies.
In the same episode, Rogan even promoted the ludicrous conspiracy that immigrants are being brought to America to help Democrats win elections: “What they’re doing is they’re trying to make it so that no one but the Democrats can ever win ever again. And one of the best ways to do that is ship untold numbers of people to swing states … They didn’t just do it. They flew them out there, they gave them EBT cards, they put them on Social Security … So if you can get those people to vote, they will most certainly vote for the people that are giving them that money.”
Rogan was in effect defending Trump’s anti-immigrant objectives even though he was squeamish about the recent violence used toward that end.
Lee Drutman observed in his Undercurrent Events newsletter, “it’s always easier to squeeze new facts into old frames than to rebuild the frame around inconvenient evidence—especially when the frame is also your identity.” He suggested that Rogan’s scurrying back to a Trumpian narrative is an example of “defending the status quo … becoming more expensive. Each incident forces defenders to stretch their arguments further. At some point, the story stops holding together.”
But that only matters to people who care about the story making sense because they adhere to a higher principle than Trump-Good-Democrats-Bad. We don’t know for many people within the GOP/MAGA coalition that a higher standard applies. However, given that the coalition was brittle from the start and polling and election results already indicate significant losses since the 2024 election, further losses, evenin small numbers, could pose a major problem for the Republican Party.
Short-run election losses are nothing new for political parties that stand for something and leave behind policy legacies to be proud of, because once the political pendulum swings back in their direction, their past policy achievements may be favorably reassessed. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act is a classic example. But Trump has built an Ephemeral Presidency with little durable legislation, and he’s run roughshod over their past Norquistian principles, leaving future Republicans without much to be proud of and wondering what they stand for.
Some of Trump’s ideological flexibility made political sense. For example, jettisoning the Republican Party’s obsession with the proven political losers of privatizing Social Security and Medicare was useful to expand support among working-class voters of all racial backgrounds. But the health care cuts in last year’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill have undermined that work. Initially, Trump’s tariff rhetoric had appeal to working-class voters who blamed cheap Chinese imports for lost manufacturing jobs. But in practice, Trump’s tariffs have only jacked up retail prices without sparking a domestic manufacturing resurgence. He has delivered little of economic substance to the working class, and they’ve noticed. The Minneapolis homicides may end up shattering the MAGA coalition by losing libertarian-minded voters who reject Trump’s cult of personality. But even if the violence of the past few weeks fades in the public memory, Trump’s failure to deliver a more affordable life to the voters on whom he was most reliant poses an existential threat to the current construction of the Republican Party.
