Welcome to a new week with Washington Secrets. Visitors are descending on the nation’s capital for the semiquincentennial, we’re getting to the business end of the World Cup, and there’s an end-of-term feeling in the air. Today, we bring you a fascinating new poll that dives into the core groups inside the Trump coalition, and worrying signs for Republicans that the most fragile part of it cannot be relied upon in the midterm elections, plus there is bad news for pedophiles hoping to run for Republican Party office in North Carolina …Donald Trump’s political career has long broken the laws of political physics. Gaffes, defeats, and even a criminal conviction that could have killed off other politicians have only hardened his support.
A new poll from More in Common suggests that he may be showing a degree of political mortality as the midterm elections approach.The results, shared with Secrets, found that a key younger segment of his 2024 coalition says it may not vote Republican in November because of concerns about prices, the Iran war, and scandals such as the Epstein crisis. (A PDF of key findings is here.)Only 2 in 5 of these “Reluctant Republicans” — people who voted Trump because they did not like Kamala Harris, who generally feel disconnected from politics, and a group that skews younger than the general Trump coalition — say they will vote only for GOP candidates.Some 14% of that group say they will back Democrats instead, and 71% say they will vote for a mix of candidates.Many may well just stay home, said Stephen Hawkins, global director of research for More in Common, a nonprofit group that examines social faultlines.“It’s not just, ‘Oh, he’s not doing as well as we thought he would be doing in terms of helping the economy turn around,’” he told Secrets. “It’s that there’s a sense it’s much worse than that, because the president is trying to distract from the Epstein scandal, and it’s coming at the expense of everyday Americans’ pocketbooks.”Overall, 11% of Gen Z and 8% of millennial Trump voters say they will vote Democratic, compared with 3% of Gen X and boomers.The results come from a survey of 2,788 U.S. adults with an oversample of 2,029 2024 Trump voters. It was conducted from June 10 to 17.And it builds on the group’s previous work on the anatomy of Trump’s 2024 coalition.
