The voters who built Donald Trump's political career are turning on him, and the person sounding the loudest alarm is a pollster who has worked for Trump for years. A new CBS News poll shows 54% of white voters without a college degree now disapprove of Trump's performance. That number was 32% when he took office in January 2025.
The Numbers Are Not Ambiguous
Let's just run through what has happened since Trump returned to the White House, according to reporting from The Guardian and the underlying polls it cites. Factory jobs are down 68,000. Inflation is running at 4.2%, the highest rate in three years. Tomato prices are up 32% over the past year. Coffee is up 17%. Beef is up 13%. Surging energy prices have erased 18 months of wage gains for the average American worker, per a Bureau of Labor Statistics report cited by the New York Times.
In 2024, Trump won 66% of white voters without a college degree. That was the backbone of his coalition, the group he wooed with promises to slash immigration, slash prices, bring back manufacturing jobs, and stay out of foreign wars. He delivered on the immigration crackdown, at least until federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and the crackdown itself started bleeding support. On every other promise, he has face-planted spectacularly.
A Fox News poll, not exactly a left-wing outfit, found that just 33% of white blue-collar voters approve of how Trump has handled the economy. Only 25% approve of his handling of inflation. These are not numbers a political party survives a midterm election with.
"I Love the Inflation" Is Going to Age Poorly
Even by Trump standards, the recent statements have been something. Last week, with inflation rising, Trump told reporters: "I love the inflation." The month before that, he said: "I don't think about Americans' financial situation," framing it as focus on the Iran war. These are direct quotes, not paraphrases, and they will be in Democratic campaign ads from now until November.
Peggy Liff, a 57-year-old welder from Ohio who voted for Trump three times, told the Washington Post exactly what a lot of people in her position are feeling. "He's concentrating on other things, like overseas, Iran," she said. "He says he's doing it for us, but I don't see where that's happening." There is no focus group result or poll number that captures the damage of a sentence like that from a three-time Trump voter.
The Iran war is a through-line in all of this. The Guardian's Steven Greenhouse notes that blue-collar voters are furious about the conflict, both because Trump promised no new foreign wars and because the war itself has pushed up gas prices and grocery bills. You can abstract away a lot of policy failures. You cannot abstract away what it costs to fill your tank or buy groceries.
The Big Beautiful Bill Did What Everyone Said It Would Do
Here is the thing about working-class voters noticing that the economy has turned against them: they are also noticing who is benefiting. The same week Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire, a BLS report found that energy price increases had wiped out a year and a half of wage growth for the average worker. That juxtaposition was not lost on people. The New York Times ran the headline "Wages Are Falling. Wealth Is Surging. No Wonder Americans Are Unhappy."
The legislation made it concrete. According to The Guardian's reporting, Trump's big, beautiful bill delivered more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts aimed at the ultra-wealthy while simultaneously cutting Medicaid and food assistance by over a trillion dollars. That is not a bug, it is the bill. And the voters it hits hardest are the exact voters Trump needs to stay home or hold their noses and vote Republican in November.
Trump has also pushed to weaken labor unions throughout his second term, which has not gone unnoticed among the blue-collar workers who make up his supposed base. Letting Musk run loose through federal agencies and fire career government employees did not play well either. A lot of those fired federal workers live in working-class communities and their neighbors watched it happen.
Republicans Know They Have a Problem
John McLaughlin is a Republican pollster who has worked for Trump for years. He is not a critic, not an apostate, not a Never Trumper. He told the New York Times: "It's working-class voters who are not happy with the Republican party, and they may not come out and vote." When your own pollster is saying that on the record to major newspapers months before a midterm, you are in genuine trouble.
The NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll found that 44% of white voters without a college degree now say they are more likely to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate than a Republican. Right before the 2018 midterms, that number was 30%. The Democrats took the House in 2018. That comparison is not subtle.
States like Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas all have large white working-class populations, and they are exactly the competitive terrain where House and Senate seats could flip. Republicans cannot simply write off this disenchantment as a polling artifact. The economic pain is real, the statements Trump made are on tape, and the legislative record is sitting right there for anyone to read.
The Dingo Take
Here is what makes this particular unraveling so satisfying to document: Trump did not lose these voters to a slick Democratic message or a charismatic opponent. He lost them by doing exactly what he said he would do, just with all the parts he left out during the campaign now on full display. He cut taxes for billionaires. He cut food and health care for working people. He started a war. He let prices rip. He said out loud, on camera, that he loves inflation and does not think about Americans' financial situations. These voters are not being manipulated. They are just looking at their grocery receipts.
The Democrats could absolutely still find a way to fumble this. They are structurally gifted at arriving at a moment of maximum opportunity and then having an extended argument about messaging frameworks. But the underlying conditions are as good as they have been for an out-of-power party in years. A Republican pollster is publicly warning that the base might stay home. The president is on record saying he loves inflation. The bill that gutted Medicaid has people's names on it.
Whatever happens in November, the myth that Trump was some kind of authentic champion of the working class is getting buried under the actual working class's actual disapproval numbers. It took a second term for enough people to see it clearly, which is its own kind of tragedy. But they are seeing it now.
