Donald Trump is facing a "flashing red warning" with the voters who helped reelect him, according to a new analysis from MS NOW, as his promise of a "boom" in blue-collar jobs has "completely fallen to pieces."
Trump spent considerable time and energy on the 2024 campaign trail working to appeal to blue-collar voters, MS NOW's Ja'han Jones explained in a piece from Thursday, making "ridiculous" claims that tamping down immigration and conducting mass deportations would lead to a new surge in working-class jobs for Americans. Nearly a year into his second term, however, almost the exact opposite has played, with the US seeing an overall decline in blue-collar jobs, and Trump's policies have been directly to blame.
Jones cited comments from economist Jared Bernstein, who said that Trump's sweeping tariffs had caused a noticeable decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. Later reports also showed declines in other key working-class employment sectors, most notably in the construction field.
"America is losing jobs in blue-collar industries, something that last occurred during the initial shock of the early pandemic and the depths of the Great Recession," economist Joseph Politano wrote in a blog post Jones cited. "The country is down 65k industrial jobs over the last year, a dramatic reversal from 2024, when the US added a lower-than-usual but still respectable 250k jobs. A major slowdown has hit all blue-collar sectors this year, including construction, mining, and utilities—though manufacturing and transportation are driving the vast majority of U.S. job losses."
Jones argued that this failure to embolden the blue-collar job market is directly contributing to Trump's decline in approval with voters, with a December AP-NORC poll finding that just 31 percent approved of his economic performance, an all-time low for him.
"It’s certainly noteworthy that some of the demographics he has catered to with his blue-collar rhetoric, including young men and Black and Hispanic voters, appear to think less of him now than they did a year ago," Jones wrote.
A recent survey from the Speaking With American Men (SAM) project found that younger voters across the board, including young men, "simply don’t trust the president anymore" after his failure to deliver the better economy that he promised in 2024. Younger male voters swung considerably for Trump in the last election, often credited as a key driver for his success, but those gains have now all but completely disappeared as "prices haven’t gone down, and the president seems more focused on foreign policy than domestic affordability."