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One of the more fascinating political trends of 2024 was the inversion of an ancient truism. In the old days, “marginal voters” — the typically younger, poorer people who are disengaged from political news and disinclined to vote without direct encouragement — leaned left. This made voter mobilization a greater priority for Democrats than for Republicans, whose older, higher-income, and better-educated supporters were more likely to vote. But that all flipped last year. Donald Trump held far greater appeal to non-college-educated voters, and to those who didn’t access or didn’t trust mainstream media information, than his Republican predecessors ever did. Thus he was able to outperform expectations in the high-turnout environment of an intensely competitive presidential election.
Democrats have consoled themselves that their new status as the party of high-information voters could help them in the lower-turnout environment of non-presidential elections — special and off-year elections in 2025 and the 2026 midterms, when marginal voters will be tuned out to an unusual degree. But according to public-opinion analyst G. Elliot Morris, something else is going on right now: Trump’s popularity among marginal voters is dropping like a rock:
New polling shows that the very voters who powered Trump’s return to office are now abandoning him. And if that trend holds, it could upend assumptions about how much campaign messaging and elite discourse really matter. Because it turns out the people who don’t read the Times, don’t watch the Sunday shows, and don’t care about the policy details… still care when the economy sours and their lives get harder.
Using data from YouGov surveys, Morris finds a “massive 33 percentage point decline in Trump’s net approval rating over the last 3 months with people who consume the least news.” That dwarfs a “14-point drop in Trump approval, from +3 to -11, among people who say they pay attention to the news ‘most of the time.’”
It stands to reason that people who haven’t been paying much attention to the media-borne clamor over Trump’s first 100 days in office — much as they didn’t pay attention to media-borne messaging during the 2024 presidential campaign — are forming their political attitudes from their own real-life experiences of the direction of the country, particularly in terms of the economic factors affecting them most immediately. That made them hostile to incumbent policymakers in 2024 and again in 2025, Morris suggests:
These voters reacted to inflation in 2022-2023, were primed to vote for Trump because of the good economy in 2018-2019, and for the most part the little information that reached them during the 2024 campaign did little to persuade them. Ideology drove their vote less than in 2020.
Now, with 401ks sinking, goods getting more expensive, shelves emptying, and the president saying kids should have just three dolls instead of 30, they have moved against the president again.
What’s especially interesting is that low-to-no-information voters, because they are largely immune from the partisan “messaging” conveyed through media outlets and are not really attached to either party, may be more rational than their media-savvy counterparts, at least in terms of their own perceived interests. And if nothing else, their changing allegiances may be a better barometer of political trends to come. Morris goes a step further by arguing that since objective conditions are undermining approval of Trump’s stewardship of the economy, Democratic messaging can profitably focus on noneconomic issues where persuasion is more of a factor.
While the sudden antipathy of marginal voters to Trump could be very bad news for Republican prospects in 2028 — assuming the economic Golden Age they keep trumpeting fails to appear – the impact between now and then is more debatable. Falling Trump approval ratings among the people least likely to show up for non-presidential elections may be the proverbial tree falling in the forest that no one hears. It will be interesting to see if the Republican Party chooses to leave them in unmobilized peace going forward or tries to get them back to the polls, even if they’ve soured on Donald Trump.
