Trump's winning coalition is unraveling as his MAGA base is suffers the most

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U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a breakfast with Republican Senators at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. November 5, 2025. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque

The coalition Trump built in 2024 is fracturing, and now even his MAGA base is feeling the pain.

The blue-collar supporters who have long aligned themselves with the Trump base are beginning to abandon him as he's failed to make good on economic promises, The Guardian reported on Monday.

Those who once gave Trump strong support are now frustrated by rising costs, weak economic results, and a growing sense that his policies are not improving their lives. The shift comes months before the 2026 midterm elections, where Republicans are depending on such voters to keep them in power.

The report cited 2024 numbers showing "Trump won 66 percent of white voters without a college degree." That has changed, according to a new CBS News poll, which "found that 54 percent of that demographic disapprove of his performance. That was up from 45 percent disapproval in February (before Trump began bombing Iran) and up sharply from 32 percent in February 2025."

New data suggests that the slippage is coming most sharply from white working-class and lower-income voters rather than the more affluent voters.

The larger problem for the GOP is that these voters aren't merely abandoning Trump; there is a deeper erosion of trust among voters who felt like Trump understood their economic plight more than Democrats. Blue-collar voters have traditionally been supporters of Democrats. But now, that base, including union workers, has gone full MAGA.

Trump has spent most of his first 17 months in office claiming that economic affordability was nothing more than a "Democrat hoax" and a "con job." At one point, he went so far as to claim that Democrats "made up the word affordability."

When Trump was running for office in 2024, he promised lower gas prices and lower food prices. At one point, he did a press conference with a table full of food items and gushed about the word "groceries."

Instead, voters now "face painful 4.2 percent inflation, the highest rate in three years," The Guardian continued. "Trump has utterly failed on another important promise to blue-collar Americans: to increase manufacturing jobs. Ever since Trump returned to office, the number of factory jobs has declined by 68,000. As for Trump’s promise not to begin any foreign wars, many blue-collar Americans are furious that he launched his unsuccessful war against Iran, which, to their huge dismay, has pushed up gasoline and grocery prices."

One loyal Trump supporter in Ohio, Peggy Liff, talked about how excited she was for lower inflation in the first three months of the new administration. After Trump announced his trade war, however, inflation increased. It hasn't been that low ever since and is now on the rise.

“He’s concentrating on other things, like overseas, Iran,” she told The Washington Post. “He says he’s doing it for us, but I don’t see where that’s happening.”

That said, The Guardian explained, those voters aren't ready to return to Democrats; instead, they're thinking of staying home in November.

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