The MAGA coalition is beginning to fracture, data shows
By Ariel Edwards-Levy, CNN
(CNN) — The coalition that helped return Donald Trump to the presidency two years ago is beginning to fracture, CNN Voter Poll data shows, with Democratic Senate candidates peeling away voters to win seats in deeply Republican territory this cycle.
In five races won by Democrats in states where Trump voters made up the lion’s share of the midterm electorate – Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina – roughly one-tenth of those Trump voters backed the Democratic candidate this year. Democratic candidates in Georgia and North Carolina also won more than one-tenth of Trump voters in their states.
All of those are states that Trump visited in the run-up to the midterm in an effort to rally his base and stave off Republican losses – often exhorting supporters to pretend that he was on the ballot.
But among the midterm voters who backed him in 2024, only about one-third say they viewed their House vote this year as a message of support for the president, with most saying that he wasn’t a factor at all.
Nationally, about 7% of self-reported Trump voters who turned out in this year’s election said they were backing a Democratic congressional candidate in their district.
(By contrast, more than three-quarters of 2024 Kamala Harris voters in this midterm said they viewed their House vote as a way to express opposition to Trump – and just 2% said they’d voted for a GOP candidate.)
There’s another source of erosion in Trump’s base not reflected in the Voter Poll results: the share of his supporters who, unenthusiastic or unmotivated, simply decided to sit this year’s midterm out. But even among those who went to the polls, fractures in the Trump coalition are visible.
Among the national midterm electorate, 20% of 2024 Trump voters now say they disapprove of him, with similar shares saying that the president doesn’t fight for people like them or have the right priorities.
That reflects a streak of unhappiness with Trump’s second-term decisions. Half say that economic conditions in the country are not so good or poor, and around 27% say that Trump’s economic policies have actively made things worse. A quarter say the US made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran – a decision that Vice President JD Vance singled out on Wednesday as a key factor in Republicans’ midterm loss.
“The main problem is not turnout,” Vance said in his post-midterms analysis. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
The CNN Voter Poll, a successor to previous years’ exit polls, combines traditional in-person interviews at polling places on Election Day with tens of thousands of interviews conducted nationwide in the weeks before the election.
That provides the ability to drill down into the demographics of Trump’s 2024 coalition – and to find that dissatisfaction with the direction of his second term is particularly acute among some groups. Among the midterm electorate, nearly half of male Trump voters under 30 now say they disapprove of his presidency, as do around one-quarter of Latino Trump voters, and about one third of Trump voters who identify as non-MAGA Republicans.
With Trump set to leave office in two years, it’s an open question whether his successor on the Republican ticket will be able to bring back together the fracturing coalition.
The CNN Voter Poll conducted by SSRS was conducted from October 19-November 3, and includes a representative sample of approximately 100,000 voters nationwide. The Voter Poll combines data collected from verified registered voters online and by telephone, with data collected in-person at polling locations in 15 states. Data collected before Election Day includes both pre-election and Election Day voters and has been weighted by voters’ probability of turning out. Recontact interviews were conducted among people who could not be verified as having voted prior to Election Day to confirm their choices and turnout. Respondents could complete the poll in English or Spanish. Results for the full national sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 0.5 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups and in individual states. Learn more about how the surveys were conducted here, and see results here.
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