Donald Trump Is Losing His Base, And Republicans Should Be Freaked Out
Multiple press reports over the last few weeks have confirmed that the White House and congressional Republicans are starting to worry that Donald Trump is losing his base.
It’s been generally accepted by political pundits and DC insiders that Donald Trump, while incredibly unpopular by traditional standards, has a very strong, essentially immovable base of support.
It’s a decent theory. It helps explain why no matter what Donald Trump does, his favorability stays in the mid-30s to low 40s.
But new polling data and analysis indicates that Trump is losing his base.
Trump is losing his “strong support”
This was first pointed out by Nate Silver in an article titled “Donald Trump’s base is shrinking”.
The group of people who say they strongly support Donald Trump has been falling rapidly. As Silver noted, “There’s been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support.”
This indicates that Trump’s supporters, in fact, wouldn’t stand by him if he went out on Fifth Avenue and shot people as he once bragged.
So while Trump’s base of support is still steady around the mid 30’s to low 40s, his supporters are less enthusiastic about to him and his presidency.
Trump is also losing support from key groups of supporters
And it’s not just the intensity of support that Trump needs to worry about – he’s also losing support from some of his key groups of supporters.
We noted recently that Donald Trump is rapidly losing support from military communities. Trump won military communities by 17 points in 2016 but his support there has rapidly eroded.
Trump’s military support has dropped sharply in the last month from 51 percent approval during first 100 days in office to just 43 percent approval for the month of May.
And Trump is also losing support from “non-college whites,” another key part of his 2016 coalition.
According to the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, only 46% of whites with no college degree approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. But in the same poll in March, 60 percent of whites without college degrees approved of his job performance.
