A woman at the "Million MAGA March" in Washington D.C. on December 8, 2020 (Image: Shutterstock)
Never Trump Conservative website The Bulwark periodically “takes the pulse” of swing voters who voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and their most recent survey revealed what “a difference a year makes,” according to publisher Sarah Longell.
“The swing voters we're going to hear today are about as sour on Trump as they have been since he re-took office,” said Longwell, on Bulwark’s “Secret Podcast” Saturday.
Podcast guest speaker and Atlantic contributor Jonathan Chait shared his own frustration at the swing voters’ shift in opinions, saying “every time I hear swing voters, I want to kill myself and kill them” for their choices.
This included one North Carolina woman who admitted: “I heard a lot of why I shouldn't vote for [Trump]. And that thought process was definitely in my head at the time. But since doing so, it's almost like every single thing that they told me is happening.”
“See, that's all I'm ever listening for,” erupted Longwell at the woman’s admission that “never Trumpers were right”. “I blacked out after that!”
Another Trump voter admitted that, on the economy, things were “not going well.”
“I was looking yesterday and, you know, Americans have lost over $1 trillion in their wealth in the last year, while the top 1 percent has gained over $10 trillion. And it's like, that's not exactly what was supposed to be happening,” said the unnamed man. “There's this bifurcation where the stock market seems to be doing well, but people aren't. And so, I think that's given a false sense of security that if you're doing well, you think everything's great, but you don't realize it's not going well for the vast majority of people.”
Still another commenter, who claimed to have “worked for [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] for several years” before moving on to another agency, slammed Trump for “deporting less people than both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.” He called videos of ICE officers storming businesses and homes and frog-marching undocumented laborers away “a big media show that goes out and puts officers' lives at risk.”
Another Trump swing voter said: “The sole reason I voted for him last time was because, as a Jewish person, I felt unsafe, and I felt the Democrats were incredibly weak in combating antisemitism.”
“I felt that their party had become infected with antisemitism, and that was incredibly scary to me. And all this other stuff didn't even matter,” he continued. “I just wanted to be safe. I wanted to feel safe. And I thought Trump would be able to send a message that he wasn't going to put up with any of that nonsense. And it didn't feel like it's panned out. I actually feel less safe. … You know, every single decisive conversation seems to have some sort of undertones of, you know, ‘the Jews control the media or the Jews do this, the Jews do that.’”
“I'm glad something has finally struck them,” said Chait. “… I guess it's good that they're intuiting at some level that things are not going well.”
Catch the Bulwark “Secret Podcast” at this link.