'Small ray of light': Trump voters are quietly ditching MAGA

In the United States' 2024 presidential election, there were two very different types of Donald Trump voters: MAGA diehards and frustrated independents. And the latter are a lot more flexible, as some of them voted for Democratic Joe Biden in 2020 but, in 2024, were frustrated over inflation and liked Trump's promise to lower prices "on Day 1."

Salon's Amanda Marcotte has written extensively about "low-information" independents who don't necessarily pay close attention to politics but were drawn to Trump's messaging on the economy in 2024. And those independents and swing voters don't have the intense devotion to Trump that his hardcore MAGA base does.

In an article published on January 19, however, Marcotte takes a look at Republicans who were enthusiastically MAGA in 2024 yet are now "quietly" slipping away from the 2024 coalition.

"A decade into our collective Donald Trump nightmare," Marcotte laments, "most of the reality-based population has given up on hoping MAGA voters will wake up and see the light. We've come to realize that he could eat a live kitten on TV and they, unwilling to admit his critics were right all along, would argue that kitten was 'Antifa' and liberals are the ones who are stupid for not seeing the threat the kitten posed to our safety. I predicted this miserable state of affairs back in 2017, after interviewing psychology experts on cognitive dissonance."

Marcotte continues, "For Trump voters, the pain of saying 'I was wrong' is too great. They would rather burn the country to the ground than accept fault. If anything, the worse Trump acts, the harder they cling to him because the psychic price of saying 'liberals were right all along' grows steeper. The situation can feel hopeless, especially in the face of events like the recent killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis."

The Salon journalist notes, however, that "there is a small ray of light in all this darkness."

"Polling suggests that a small but important number of Trump voters are trying to pull an Irish exit, abandoning the coalition quietly rather than continuing the miserable task of pretending what he's doing is OK," Marcotte explains. "On Friday, (January 16), data journalist G. Elliott Morris analyzed and compared the past year's polls to Trump's first term…. . According to Morris, 'Republican identification dropped from 46 percent in 2024 to just 40 percent in Q4 of 2025 — a 6-point decline, triple the 2-point drop during Trump’s first term."

Marcotte adds, "It's still a small number, but it's significant because it suggests people are starting to find it embarrassing to say they are Republicans. They're looking for a way to distance themselves from Trump and the MAGA movement without admitting fault…. Even if most of these quiet defectors aren't going to vote for Democrats, this polling shift — especially taken with Trump's declining approval ratings — suggests that enthusiasm for Republicans is sliding downhill.

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.