'Conditions have worsened': Bad news for Trump as he bleeds support from core voters

Born and raised in Queens, President Donald Trump spent much of his life in New York City and made millions of dollars from Manhattan real estate. Trump is an urbanite: he went to college in Philadelphia, owned casinos in Atlantic City, and began living in Washington, D.C. when he first moved into the White House on January 20, 2017.

Trump's strong Queens accent, however, has never kept him from having a strong rapport with rural voters and white southern evangelical Christian fundamentalists — both of whom are crucial parts of his base. Rural America overwhelmingly favored Trump in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.

But according to polling by ActiVote, Trump's popularity in Rural America is slipping.

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Newsweek's Kate Plummer, in an article published on September 5, reports that ActiVote finds Trump's "net approval" among "rural Americans" has "declined from +22 percentage points in August to +14 points in September."

"Rural voters are an important voting bloc and are key to Trump's base," Plummer explains. "In the 2024 election, Trump won 63 percent of rural voters, up from 60 percent in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. Any decline in their support might affect the Republican Party more broadly. This will be particularly important when voters head to the polls in the November 2026 midterms…. In its August poll, ActiVote found that 59 percent of rural Americans approved of Trump, while 37 percent disapproved of the president. This gave him a net approval rating of +22 points."

Heath Brown, a public policy professor at the City University of New York, told Newsweek, "It seems that there remain some issues that Americans living in rural communities favor the president a great deal. On others, including the signature tariff policy, rural communities have been hardest hit. Tariffs have hurt farmers, and polling seems to bear this out."

According to Tim Slack, a sociology professor at Louisiana State University, the economy in Rural America is growing worse — not better — during Trump's second presidency.

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Slack told Newsweek, "President Trump had vowed to 'bring prices down, starting on Day One.' That didn't happen. In fact, in many respects, economic conditions have worsened. And while economic conditions and the cost of living are likely the bigger factors here, it is worth noting that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid play a significant role in supporting rural Americans. There could be unease about the cutting at the federal level and where that is headed."

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Read Kate Plummer's full article for Newsweek at this link.