These Americans who voted for Trump are now ashamed of it

When reporters and data analysts were carefully going over poll after poll during the United States' 2024 presidential race, some of them cautioned that polls tended to underreport support for Donald Trump — the reason being that some swing voters and independents weren't proud that they were voting for him. Trump's hardcore MAGA base aren't shy about expressing their support, but swing voters and independents who decided to vote for Trump lacked that strong devotion to the MAGA movement.

The Daily Beast's Martha McHardy, in an article published on February 26, takes a look at 2024 Trump voters who — 13 months into his second presidency — "are now reluctant to publicly acknowledge they voted for him."

"Pollsters Verasight and The Argument conducted surveys of Donald Trump voters between August 2025 and February 2026 among 12,180 respondents," McHardy explains. "These same voters were polled immediately after the 2024 election about who they voted for. The two polls show that about 6 percent now deny ever having voted for Trump despite reporting they did so in 2024. Among those voters, 2.7 percent falsely claim they voted for Democrat Kamala Harris, while 3.3 percent say they voted for neither Trump nor Harris."

Pollsters, McHardy notes, "have long observed that people don't always accurately report how they voted when they are dissatisfied with the candidate's performance —a pattern called 'recall bias.'"

"Among nonvoters or third-party voters who now approve of Trump, 43 percent claim they voted for him, while just 5 percent of those who disapprove say they did," the Daily Beast reporter observes. "Similarly, among 2024 Harris voters, those who approve of her mostly report accurately, with 73 percent saying they voted for Harris, while disapproving Harris voters are even more precise, with 98 percent accurately reporting their vote."