'Rough news': Polling data analyst says 3 groups in 'the new Trump coalition' could doom GOP in 2026

When Joe Biden was three and one-half months into his presidency, he still had strong approval ratings; it wasn't until later that Biden, thanks to pandemic-related inflation, saw his popularity plummet in polls. But President Donald Trump, now three and one-half months into his second term, is suffering increasingly low approval ratings in countless polls.

Carrie Dann, managing editor for the Cook Political Report, offered polling analysis on Trump during a Wednesday, May 7 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." And she pointed out that if Trump's approval ratings continue to fall, it could be bad news for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.

Dann told "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski, "You know, and your viewers all know, that the president of the United States' approval rating is a great proxy when we're looking at what's going to happen in the midterms…. What we've seen is over the last three weeks or so, the president's approval rating…. dropped a net of about seven percentage points. Right? And we saw the most dramatic drops in some of those demographic groups that we're tracking. This poll tracker is aggregating from 21 different polls and looking into those demographic numbers, aggregating that data so we can get a really good sense of how these subgroups are thinking about the president."

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The three groups that Cook Political is paying close attention to, according to Dann, are Latinos, independents and younger voters.

Trump made inroads with all three of those groups in 2024 — enough to enjoy a narrow victory over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, who he defeated by roughly 1.5 percent in the national popular vote (according to Cook).

"And so when we saw this big drop from Latinos, I think that's really important," Dann told Brzezinski. "But the biggest drop was from younger voters and independents.… Those are the three groups, if you look back at 2020 and 2024, that's the groups that Donald Trump got the biggest bump in between his 2020 and his 2024 election. Right? This is the new Trump coalition. It's his overperformance with these demographic subgroups."

Dann continued, "That means that it's pretty rough news for Republicans if they want to rebuild that coalition in 2026. Right? If they want to perform in the midterms and maybe retain their majority — or probably, more realistically, at least mitigate their losses in the 2026 election — they're going to need to have that coalition in place and activated."

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