GOP pollster says MAGA is ‘disillusioned’ as Trump myth goes up in smoke

On Tuesday, a prominent Republican pollster revealed that voters who cast for President Donald Trump have become “disillusioned” by his lack of concern for the problems faced by Americans. This is according to Kristen Soltis Anderson, who writes in the New York Times that Trump’s former supporters are sick of his corruption, vanity projects, and lack of attention to the cost-of-living crisis.

“Arguably, pocketbook issues led Donald Trump back to the White House for a second term,” explains Soltis Anderson. “Poll after poll in 2024 showed the economy as the top issue and tended to show him with a significant advantage on who was more trusted to handle it. Today, President Trump and Republicans haven’t merely lost that advantage; they’re underwater on the cost-of-living issue by an eight-point margin. And this year a second issue has been rising in my polling, ranking below the cost of living but ahead of other concerns. It’s not just the economy: ‘It’s the corruption,’ too.”

According to Soltis Anderson, voters don’t think the economy is working for them, and that it’s been rigged for a select few who have cozied up to the president. The situation, she says, has put “Trump and Republicans in a terrible position on the eve of an election. It’s also eating away at the winning brand that Mr. Trump cultivated over many years.” Trump’s voters once considered him an “outsider” who wasn’t in on the GOP establishment, but now, writes Soltis Anderson, “his voters are wondering if that’s still true. Robert, one of the Trump-voting Texas swing voters in a recent Times Opinion focus group for which I was a moderator, put it this way: ‘You used to think that you could count on the Republicans to be able to help out with the economy.’ Now, he said, it feels as if ‘it’s going to be the top class or the certain friends that are getting the benefit of the economy, not the general folks.’”

While Trump’s supporters used to think of him as “a tycoon who put his glitzy life on hold in order to fix a broken Washington,” today, writes Soltis Anderson, “they see headlines about memecoin scams, inexplicable pardons and the enormous wealth that the president’s family and close associates are accumulating, and some of them are beginning to draw a different conclusion.” What’s more, his voters don’t believe that he cares about cost-of-living issues. According to her polling, writes Soltis Anderson, only four in 10 voters believe he is prioritizing cost-of-living issues, “fewer than the number who think he has prioritized projects such as building a White House ballroom or renovating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Even among Republican voters, only six in 10 think he has made the cost of living a top priority. Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters grumble that he’s out chasing pet projects and feeding his ego, busy renaming buildings and bodies of water. As Pam, another of my focus-group participants, put it: ‘Those things to me are a waste, instead of spending time on what’s going on here in the U.S. and the fact that people are struggling.’”

Soltis Anderson asserts that the current economic situation would be a problem for any incumbent administration, “but add to it the gold leaf and vanity projects, and you wind up with a politically perilous one-two punch.” And with this in mind, the pollster arrives at a grim forecast for her Republican colleagues, writing, “Some of the people who’ve believed in Mr. Trump over the past decade seem to be coming to the conclusion that the outsider businessman they voted for is just another typical politician. And while there are surely plenty of disillusioned Trump voters who wouldn’t dare cast a ballot for a Democrat, there’s no guarantee that they’ll bother to turn out on Election Day if they feel their own side is behaving poorly. Come November, that’s a slice of their coalition that Republicans can’t afford to lose.”