Trump's approval rating drops among White working-class voters

When Ashton Reed voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, he was drawn by Trump's vow to recharge the economy and curb the inflation that many around his hometown of Jackson, Missouri, blamed on then-President Joe Biden.

Reed, 22, who has worked at an auto equipment factory and a heating and air-conditioning company, has since seen prices rise and a war in Iran of the kind Trump promised to avoid. He also has been uneasy about Trump's aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.

A few months ago, Reed priced an Affordable Care Act health insurance plan for his wife and discovered it was too expensive after Trump and congressional Republicans allowed pandemic-era subsidies to expire. More recently, Reed, who does not have a four-year college degree, was laid off from his HVAC job.

"A huge chunk of why I voted for him in 2024 was because of economics," Reed 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 an important base of support, drawn to his vows to bring back manufacturing and crack down on immigration. In 2024, 2 in 3 White working-class voters backed him, according to research group PRRI's post-election survey. Trump won 69% of the rural vote in 2024, according to Pew Research Center exit polling.

But polling over recent months has shown rising disapproval from those groups, reaching majorities in some polls, especially on the economy – fueling a potential new vulnerability for Republicans heading into midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

A CBS News-YouGov poll in May found 54% of White, noncollege voters disapproved of Trump's performance, up from 32% in February 2025. That disapproval hit 49% in a June NPR/PBS/Marist poll and 51% in an April Fox News poll. Among rural voters, a June Reuters/Ipsos poll found 48% disapproved of Trump, up from 34% the month after he returned to office.

"The decline is significant given that White working-class voters were a pretty stable support between 2016 and 2020 for Trump after trending Republican since the early 1990s," said Noam Lupu, a Vanderbilt University political science professor.

The main driver of the discontent is higher prices for necessities like gas and food, pushed up by the Iran war and tariffs, experts said.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said that gas prices and inflation will drop once the Iran conflict resolves. And the Treasury Department recently sought to highlight how families have benefited from tax cuts.

Although Trump won't be on the November ballot, growing disapproval could bleed into the GOP's midterm fortunes, Lupu said. While "stickiness" of U.S. party affiliation means relatively few such voters are likely to switch allegiances to Democrats, it may hurt Republicans by dampening turnout.

Reed, who no longer supports the MAGA movement for a variety of reasons, said plenty of people in his largely conservative part of Missouri, just west of the Mississippi River, still do. But Reed predicted he won't be the only former Trump voter who is "going to possibly vote for a Democrat for the first time in their lives" in the midterms.

Economic pinch driving more disapproval

In Hazard, Kentucky, a small town tucked into the Appalachian region where coal once reigned supreme, resident Denver Feltner also had high hopes when he voted for Trump's return.

The 38-year-old father of five, who works two jobs – as a public safety dispatcher and a process server for court papers – felt Trump had shepherded the economy well in his first term before the COVID-19 pandemic. He believed he could do it again.

"Not anymore," he said in July.

Instead of costs of living decreasing, Feltner's grocery bills have spiked and his health insurance premiums went up fourfold after the ACA's enhanced premium tax credits expired last year, leaving Feltner to go without for months despite a history of health problems. A Fox News April poll found that 38% of White, noncollege respondents approved of Trump's handling of inflation.

"I was pretty good under his first term, but it's completely different," he said.

Feltner lives in Perry County, which is part of an eastern Kentucky region with high rates of poverty and chronic disease. About 44% of residents in the region's congressional district relied on Medicaid in 2024, according to Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

Medicaid rolls are expected to drop because of Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," which is projected to cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and a related children's health program and leave millions nationally without coverage.

Those without four-year degrees aren't all in traditional blue-collar jobs and can include anyone from well-paid skilled tradespeople and small business owners to a typically low-paid home health care worker or retail workers. Some are also in more traditional fields like mining and manufacturing.

Trump's tariffs were meant in part to fuel a manufacturing revival. While there have been new investments in some industries, those efforts take a long time to come to fruition or be noticed by voters, said Heath Brown, a professor of public policy at John Jay College in New York.

Overall, manufacturing jobs have seen a slight decline since Trump took office. Some auto companies have scaled back or shelved EV projects as the administration rolled back Biden-era support and environmental regulation.

In June, the Trump administration announced a nearly $700 million plan to boost coal-fired power plants and coal exports, which came after coal exports fell in 2025 amid tariff battles with China.

In Feltner's part of Appalachian Kentucky, many coal unions and residents historically backed Democrats as the party of the working class. Over time, the region has evolved into a deep red Republican stronghold.

This fall, the region's Republican Rep. Hal Rogers, who has served in Congress since 1981, is being challenged by an attorney running as a Democrat who has highlighted Medicaid cuts. It's widely viewed as an uphill campaign. Rogers ran uncontested in 2024 and beat a Democratic challenger in 2022 with 82% of the vote.

Feltner, who plans to vote in the midterms, said he never was a party-line voter. He hasn't looked into candidates' policies yet, he said, but affordable health care is a high priority.

Whichever candidate is "wanting to try and fix the medical situation, he will more than likely get my vote," Feltner said.

Farmers face strains, but some say Trump is on the right path

In rural southwest Minnesota, Bob Worth farms 1,700 acres of soybeans and corn on the Lincoln County farm that he took over from his father straight out of high school.

"It's a rewarding life, but it's a very tough financial life," the 73-year-old said, noting he is accustomed to ups and downs. That includes struggles with prices and costs during the Biden administration that helped fuel his vote for Trump in 2024.

In 2025, U.S. soybean growers were hit hard by disputes over Trump's tariffs that halted important sales to China, which began buying soybeans from South America. Since then, China has agreed to buy a certain amount of U.S. soybeans each year through 2028, which he said had helped.

But Worth, who has served in various roles on the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, said low prices for crops and high costs for fuel and fertilizer – which have been driven up by the war in Iran – have combined to create ongoing challenges. Worth said he's lucky to have little debt, but that's not the case for many younger farmers.

"Our cash flows right now are in the red," he said.

Tim Slack, a professor of sociology at Louisiana State University who studies rural America, said higher fuel prices especially hurt rural areas because people drive longer distances for jobs, schools and groceries, and farms rely on trucks and equipment.

In other parts of the country, Trump's immigration crackdown has at times made it harder for farmers and milk producers to get enough farm labor. Farm bankruptcies increased 46% in 2025 from a year earlier, according to the Farm Bureau.

The Fox News poll from April found that 69% of White rural voters said the economy was getting worse.

But Trump supporters have long given the president leeway. Worth, who said he's voted for candidates of different stripes, believes that the Iran war was worthwhile to keep the regime from developing nuclear weapons.

"I'm thinking he's going in the right direction. We won't know until we get a little bit further in it. I still have hope and faith in him to get it done; he's a businessman, he's not a politician," he said.

Worth didn't detail his voting preferences for November but said he'll be focused on candidates who want to help farmers. And he expects many people will be motivated to come out and vote: "I think you're going to see a big turnout for the election," despite what he said was fatigue over politics on both sides.

Will the dissatisfaction impact midterms?

It's typical that a president's party loses congressional seats in midterm elections. During Trump's first term, the GOP lost 41 House seats but retained the Senate.

But in 2018, working-class White voters still approved of Trump's economic management by margins of 30 percentage points, a New York Times analysis of polling found. Now, polls show them disapproving by anywhere from 14 to more than 30 points.

To be sure, disapproval from former Trump voters does not mean they will necessarily cross party lines, especially because the Democratic brand has suffered in some rural and heavily White working-class regions, such as Appalachia, in recent decades.

Still, an April NPR/PBS/Marist poll found 44% of White noncollege voters said they were more likely to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate than for a Republican, up from just 30% ahead of the 2018 midterms. That could come into play in rural states.

In Iowa, for example, which Trump carried by 13 percentage points in 2024 and whose six House seats are held by Republicans, The Wall Street Journal reported that the race for governor and two of its four House seats are now rated as toss-ups amid rural economic angst.

The larger question, Lupu said, is whether the polling represents a temporary, price-driven grumble that reverses once inflation cools, or if it marks durable cracks in working-class and rural voters' yearslong move toward Republicans.

It was that ideological alignment, and not just economic discontent, that helped Trump garner that group's support in 2024, according a Center for Politics at the University of Virginia report.

"People change their preferences and their voting behavior typically very, very slowly, and often not at all," Lupu said. "A lot of the big changes we see in American politics are often generational."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's approval rating drops among White working-class voters

Reporting by Chris Kenning, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

This story was originally published July 12, 2026 at 4:09 PM.