There are signs that Donald Trump voters and Republican lawmakers are not as staunchly devoted to the president as they once were, CNN’s data guru reveals.
Harry Enten, the network’s chief data analyst, noted that the number of Trump 2024 voters who “strongly approve” of the president plunged from 66 percent in a March Fox News survey to 50 percent last month.
Trump also suffered a major embarrassment on Thursday after Republicans in the GOP-controlled Indiana Senate ignored the president’s demands and voted not to redraw the state’s congressional map, which would have given the GOP two safe red seats ahead of next year’s midterms.
“What happened in Indiana, in my mind, is representative of what we are seeing nationwide among 2024 Trump voters,” Enten told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “That is, they may still like him, but they don’t love him in the same fashion that they once did, and they’re more than willing to go against him when they feel like it’s the right thing to do, which clearly a lot of those folks in the Indiana Senate felt it was.”
The Fox News poll showed that the disquiet among Trump supporters is part of a broader trend in which the 79-year-old is recording record-low approval ratings across multiple surveys.
Trump’s handling of the economy—and the billionaire’s insistence that there is no cost-of-living crisis—is also facing growing blowback from voters. On Thursday, an AP-NORC poll found that just 31 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, a record low for the president and a nine-point drop from March.
When broken down further, the poll finds 69 percent of Republicans who took part in the survey say they approve of the president’s handling of the economy, down from 78 percent in March.
The Fox News poll cited by Enten also states that 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy—another record low for the president. The poll also showed that 42 percent of Trump 2024 voters blame the president for the current dire state of the economy.
It is widely expected that backlash to Trump will severely hinder the GOP in the 2026 midterms, where they already face an uphill battle to retain control of the House and possibly the Senate.
Republicans’ attempts to give themselves a slight advantage via gerrymandering are also, so far, proving fruitless, Enten noted. Not only did the Indiana state Senate vote 19–31 against the proposed GOP-friendly redistricting map, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom could largely cancel out any additional seats the GOP might have gained with his retaliatory 5-seat pickup for Democrats in the Golden State.
“So it turns out this is basically going to be a wash, this entire effort for Donald Trump to have redistricting mid-cycle,” Enten said. “It did not work.”
