GOP support takes 'alarming nosedive' with major Trump demographic

Crowd cheers on the day President Donald Trump delivers a speech on energy and the economy, in Clive, Iowa, January 27, 2026.

The GOP's midterm woes continue to mount, with The Hill on Friday breaking down the party's "alarming nosedive" in support from a demographic that Donald Trump carried by significant margins in his races.

Citing statistics from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, The Hill's report explained how, from the period spanning 1980 to 2020, "working class" white voters — meaning those without college degrees — made a significant shift from supporting the Democratic Party by a slight margin, around 2 percent, to supporting Republicans by an overwhelming one, just shy of 24 percent.

This allowed the GOP to effectively brand itself as the working-class party, a notion reflected in the demographic wins in each of Trump's three presidential races, where these working-class white voters made up a "majority of his overall support." The overall number of these voters has been shrinking, however, but the party has managed to avoid a disaster because of that trend by winning an increasingly large percentage of them each year. In the 2024 presidential race, Trump won 66 percent of the white working-class vote, though they only made up 40 percent of the electorate.

"Like a diver on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Republicans are going from increasing heights into a smaller and smaller pool," The Hill's report explained. "Which is fine, as long as you hit the target."

Hitting that target might finally be getting too difficult, however, as recent findings from "Marist College’s excellent polling unit" showed major dissatisfaction with Trump from that key demographic.

"Trump’s approval rating among whites without college degrees — the same voters that went for Trump by a 2-to-1 ratio in 2024 — is 46 percent," The Hill's report detailed. "Trump is at 43 percent with these voters on his handling of the economy, including an abysmal 38 percent among the women of that group. These voters don’t even like the tariffs that are supposed to be a boon to them: 35 percent approve of Trump on the import taxes."

The report continued: "On how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting its operations? The white working class clocks in at 40 percent approval. On foreign policy generally, it’s 43 percent. On Greenland, it’s 13 percent. Woof."

The Hill noted that despite these alarming shifts in sentiment, it remains unlikely that these white working-class voters will shift towards voting for Democrats. At least based on current findings, the opposition party is not especially popular with those voters either. That could result in a situation come November where they simply opt not to vote at all, which would still put Republican candidates in a major bind.

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