Polls show support for President Donald Trump is declining among white working-class voters and rural voters, but that doesn’t mean they’re all leaning toward Democrats in the midterm elections.
Mr. Trump’s core is loyalty. Sway voters? There aren’t that many.
President Trump’s base remains loyal, but the voters who will decide the election are turning away, putting pressure on Republicans heading into November.
- A CBS News-YouGov poll conducted in May found that 54% of white non-college voters disapproved of President Trump’s performance, up from 32% in February 2025.
- Experts say the main cause of dissatisfaction is the soaring prices of essential goods such as gasoline and food, driven up by the Iran war and tariffs.
When Ashton Reid voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, he was drawn to Trump’s promises to boost the economy and curb inflation, which many people around his hometown of Jackson, Missouri, blamed then-President Joe Biden.
Reed, 22, who has worked at an auto equipment factory and a heating and air-conditioning company, has since seen rising prices and the kind of war with Iran that President Trump promised to avert. He is also concerned about President Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement strategy.
A few months ago, Mr. Reed priced an Affordable Care Act health insurance plan for his wife, only to realize it was too high after President Trump and Congressional Republicans allowed pandemic-era subsidies to expire. Most recently, Mr. Reed, who did not have a four-year college degree, was fired from his job in HVAC.
“A big part of why I voted for him in 2024 was for economic reasons,” Reid said of Trump. “Obviously not happy with him at all.”
Since Trump first ran for president a decade ago, white working-class and rural voters have been a key base, drawn to his promises to revive manufacturing and crack down on immigration. Two in three white working-class voters supported him in 2024, according to a post-election poll by research group PRRI. Trump won 69% of the local vote in 2024, according to Pew Research Center exit polls.
But polls in recent months have shown rising disapproval among these groups, with some polls reaching majorities, especially in the economic field, raising potential new vulnerabilities for Republicans heading into the midterm elections to take control of Congress.
A May poll by CBS News and YouGov found that 54% of white non-college voters disapproved of President Trump’s performance, up from 32% in February 2025. His disapproval rating reached 49% in a June NPR/PBS/Marist poll and 51% in an April Fox News poll. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump’s disapproval rating among rural voters was 48%, up from 34% the month after he returned to office.
“This decline is significant given that white working-class voters supported Trump fairly consistently from 2016 to 2020, after trending toward Republicans since the early 1990s,” said Norm Lupu, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.
Experts say the main cause of dissatisfaction is the soaring prices of essential goods such as gasoline and food, driven up by the Iran war and tariffs.
White House Press Secretary Khush Desai said gasoline prices and inflation would fall once the Iran conflict was resolved. The Treasury has recently sought to highlight how households are benefiting from tax cuts.
Although Trump will not be on the ballot in November, Lupu said the growing disapproval could affect the party’s medium-term fortunes. America’s party affiliation means such voters are relatively unlikely to switch allegiance to the Democratic Party, but lower turnout could hurt Republicans.
Reed said that while he no longer supports the MAGA movement for a variety of reasons, many people in Missouri’s primarily conservative region, just west of the Mississippi River, still do. But Reed predicted he would not be the only former Trump voter who “may vote Democratic for the first time in his life” in the midterm elections.
Disapproval grows due to economic crisis
In Hazard, Kentucky, a small town in the once-coal-rich Appalachian region, resident Denver Feltner also had high hopes when she voted for Trump to return.
The 38-year-old father of five, who works two jobs as a public safety dispatcher and a court filing officer, said he felt Trump had done a good job steering the economy in his first term, before the coronavirus pandemic. He believed he could try again.
“I’m done with it,” he said in July.
Last year, the expiration of the ACA’s enhanced insurance premium tax credit, instead of providing cost-of-living relief, spiked her family’s grocery bills and quadrupled her health insurance premiums, leaving Feltner without insurance despite her health problems. A Fox News poll in April found that 38% of white non-college respondents supported President Trump’s efforts to combat inflation.
“He was pretty good in his first term, but now it’s completely different,” he said.
Feltner lives in Perry County, part of the Eastern Kentucky region, which has high rates of poverty and chronic disease. In 2024, about 44% of residents in the area’s congressional districts were dependent on Medicaid, according to the Kentucky Economic Policy Center.
Medicaid enrollment is expected to decline as President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Act” is expected to cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and related children’s health programs, leaving millions of people across the country without coverage.
People without a four-year degree don’t all work in traditional blue-collar jobs, and include everyone from highly paid skilled workers and small business owners to typically low-wage home health care workers and retail store employees. Some companies are engaged in more traditional sectors such as mining or manufacturing.
President Trump’s tariffs were also aimed at encouraging a revival of manufacturing. Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at John Jay College in New York, said some industries are making new investments, but it will take a long time for those efforts to bear fruit or gain traction with voters.
Overall, manufacturing employment has declined slightly since President Trump took office. Some car companies are scaling back or shelving EV projects as the administration rolls back Biden-era aid and environmental regulations.
Last month, the Trump administration announced a nearly $700 million plan to expand coal-fired power plants and exports after a tariff battle with China caused coal exports to decline in 2025.
In Feltner, Kentucky, in the Appalachian Mountains, many coal unions and residents have historically supported the Democratic Party as the party of the working class. Over time, it evolved into a deep red Republican stronghold.
This fall, Hal Rogers, the area’s longtime Republican lawmaker who has served in the Legislature since 1981, is being challenged by an attorney running as a Democrat who has emphasized Medicaid cuts. This is widely seen as a difficult campaign. Mr. Rogers ran unopposed in 2024 and defeated his Democratic challenger in 2022 with 82% of the vote.
Feltner plans to vote in the midterm elections, but said he was not a partisan voter. He said he has not yet weighed the candidates’ policies, but said affordable health care is a top priority.
Whichever candidate “want to try to improve the health care situation, he’s probably going to get my vote,” he said.
Farmers face tensions, but some say President Trump is on the right track
In rural southwestern Minnesota, Bob Wirth grows 1,700 acres of soybeans and corn on the Lincoln County farm he took over from his father right out of high school.
“It’s a rewarding life, but financially it’s a very difficult one,” said the 73-year-old, who is used to ups and downs. This includes the fight against prices and costs during the Biden administration, which helped drive votes for President Trump in 2024.
US in 2025. Soybean producers have been hit hard by the dispute over President Trump’s tariffs, which halted critical sales to China, which had begun buying soybeans from South America. Since then, China has agreed to buy a certain amount of U.S. soybeans each year until 2028, which has helped, he said.
But Wirth, who has held various positions with the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, said low crop prices, spiked by the Iran war, combined with high fuel and fertilizer costs create ongoing challenges. Mr Wirth said he was lucky to have so little debt, but that wasn’t the case for many young farmers.
“Cash flow is currently in the red,” he said.
Tim Slack, a sociology professor at Louisiana State University who studies rural America, said rising fuel prices are hitting rural areas especially hard because people drive long distances to work, school and buy groceries, and farms rely on trucks and equipment.
Elsewhere in the country, President Trump’s immigration crackdown has sometimes made it difficult for farmers and milk producers to find enough farm labor. According to the Department of Agriculture, agricultural bankruptcies in 2025 increased by 46% compared to the previous year.
In an April Fox News poll, 69% of white rural voters said the economy was getting worse.
But Trump supporters have long given the president free rein. Wirth, who said he voted for candidates from a variety of positions, believes the Iran war was worth stopping the regime from developing nuclear weapons.
“I think he’s on the right track. We won’t know until we get a little further along. I still have hope and faith that he’ll get it done. He’s a businessman, not a politician.”
Wirth did not provide details about his voting intentions in November, but said he would focus on candidates who want to support farmers. And he expects many people will want to go vote.
“I think there will be a big turnout in the election,” he said, even though he said there was fatigue surrounding politics on both sides.
Will dissatisfaction affect midterm exams?
It is typical for the president’s party to lose seats in midterm elections. During President Trump’s first term, Republicans lost 41 seats in the House of Representatives but maintained their Senate seats.
But a New York Times poll analysis found that in 2018, working-class white voters still approved of President Trump’s management of the economy by a 30-point margin. Currently, according to opinion polls, the disapproval rate has increased from 14 points to more than 30 points.
To be sure, disapproval from former Trump voters doesn’t necessarily cut across party lines, as the Democratic Party’s brand has waned in recent decades, especially in some rural and white working-class areas such as Appalachia.
Still, an April NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that 44% of white non-college voters said they were more likely to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate than a Republican, up from just 30% before the 2018 midterm elections. It could have an impact even in rural states.
For example, in Iowa, where President Trump has a 13-point lead in 2024 and Republicans hold six House seats, the governor’s race and two of the four House seats are considered to be contested amid local economic instability, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The bigger question, Lupu said, is whether the poll represents temporary price-driven dissatisfaction that will reverse once inflation cools, or whether it points to a permanent rift in the long-standing shift of working-class and rural voters toward the Republican Party.
A report from the University of Virginia Center for Politics found that Trump was able to rally support from the group in 2024 not just because of economic grievances but also because of ideological unity.
“People generally change their preferences and voting behavior very slowly, and often not at all,” Lupu says. “Many of the big changes we see in American politics are often intergenerational.”
