Donald Trump supporters in 2017 (U.S. Department of Defense photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro/Wikimedia Commons)
Although the United States' 2024 presidential election results were far from the "landslide" President Donald Trump claims they were — Trump won the national popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent — the demographics outcome was a major source of frustration for Democratic strategists.
Trump was the clear favorite among working- class whites, especially working-class white males. Moreover, Trump won 48 percent of the Latino vote compared to 51 percent for Democratic nominee and then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Although Harris outperformed Trump among Latinos by 3 percent, the fact that Trump performed as well as he did among Latinos was a bitter disappointment for Democrats.
But according to reporting from Politico on January 14, Trump appears to be losing his 2024 gains among Latinos. And the Washington Post's Bill Scher, in an article published on January 30, describes another problem Trump is facing: a loss of support among whites without college degrees.
According to a Fox News poll released on January 28, only 49 percent of whites without college degrees approve of Trump's performance as president. A Pew Research poll also released in late January looks slightly better for Trump, showing him with 51 percent approval among non-college-educated whites.
"Working-class whites are the load-bearing pillar of the Republican Party's MAGA era," Scher explains. "Among all the race-and-education-level voter subgroups in the 2024 presidential election, non-college whites were the only ones who gave majority support to Trump. And not by a small amount, but by a nearly 2-1 margin… Any softness among Trump's most reliable bloc should send shivers down GOP spines. Moreover, the Fox poll is not the only data point that warrants panic among Republicans."
Scher adds that according to Pew, Trump's support among Latinos is down to an "abysmal" 26 percent.
Scher notes, "This erosion of support was showing up in the data before the two January homicides of protesters perpetrated by federal immigration agents during Trump’s mass deportation effort in Minneapolis, dubbed Operation Metro Surge…. Are the bonds of the MAGA coalition further threatened by the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti?.... The political question regarding the durability of MAGA is: Are there enough libertarian purists in the MAGA coalition who would bolt after recognizing that Trump and his diehards are their authoritarians? Or is their hatred of Democratic mainstream liberals and the rising democratic socialist faction too intense to consider abandoning the Republicans?"
Read Bill Scher's full Washington Monthly article at this link.
