Much has been made recently about Donald Trump's plummeting approval ratings, but according to a new analysis from polling analyst Lakshya Jain, he has an "underrated political weakness" growing as he suffers an "insane" loss of support from a key voting base,
On Wednesday, Jain published a breakdown of Trump's flagging support among voters from all different income levels for The Argument, noting that while he is losing popularity across the board, he is losing the most support from working class and lower income voters. The biggest drop, by far, has come from the lowest income bracket in the breakdown — voters making $25,000 or less a year.
These voters, whom Jain summed up in a post as "poor people," voted for Trump by a margin of four points. Now, per The Argument's most recent surveys, they disapprove of his performance as president by a striking 20 points.
"Compare that with voters who make over $200,000, where Trump has experienced less than half of that slippage, and the story becomes clear: An outsized part of his extreme political decline can be explained through his losses with low-income voters who backed him in 2024," Jain explained. "Accordingly, this is also where Democrats are making the largest gains."
He continued: "Democrats have gained just 1 percentage point on their 2024 margins with voters who make over $200,000, but they have gained 7 percentage points among voters who make less than $50,000. This is the main reason the party has surged into such a commanding position on the generic ballot."
Adding race as a demographic factor makes the shift even more striking, as Jain laid out in a post to X.
"Trump's underrated political weakness is poor people," Jain wrote. "In our polling, whites making <$25K backed Trump by 26 (!) in 2024. His approval with them now is breakeven. That's *insane*."
Trump's plunging approval ratings, and the tanking of the Republican Party along with him, have largely been chalked up to his inability or unwillingness in his first year to address the main issues that people voted for him based on. Many 2024 Trump voters were upset with soaring inflation, and a year on, voters still rank affordability as their number one priority.
Despite Trump's claims about a soaring economy and lower prices, voters are living out a different story and resent the president for not fixing things. In fact, many see him as actively contributing to the issue with his tariff fixation, or as indifferent to it, given his focus on building an expensive White House ballroom and foreign policy matters.