Michigan moderates who flipped from voting for former President Joe Biden in 2020 to President Donald Trump in November are regretting their decision.
A focus group assembled by researcher Rich Thau last week found swing voters in the Great Lake State were having second thoughts about their vote for Trump, with political “chaos,” still-high grocery prices, and a plummeting stock market driving their views.
On Friday, CNN featured a Zoom session with short sound bytes from a handful of the participants. They were identified only by first name and last initial.
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“Everything I believed was going to happen” under a Trump presidency has since gone the “opposite direction,” said a woman named Shannon wearing a Central Michigan University shirt
“I thought he was going to change things with affordability and make things cheaper,” she added, “But by putting these tariffs in and terrorizing the world, now things are going to only get more expensive than they already are.”
A woman named Sheryl said she is “almost scared to watch the news” anymore. A man named Phil added that Trump’s “actions have been disruptive and [are] creating chaos.”
Shannon agreed, saying, “I don’t think anyone would have voted for him if they expected to see what we’re seeing now.”
One of the voters with buyer’s remorse said she voted for Trump because she thought the economy would thrive.
“I was voting for him based off of the economy the first time around and I’m seeing a significant decline,” a voter named Samantha said.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell over three percent in the week preceding Thau’s focus group. In February, egg prices hit an all-time record.
A focus group member named Therese said succinctly, “It’s very scary.”
CNN’s Dana Bash noted that Thau described feeling “whiplash” in his focus groups week-to-week as the economy has started to falter.
Just last month in Arizona, another swing state, Thau surveyed other voters who switched votes and found all 11 were happy with the president’s handling of the economy. In Michigan this week, however, he said 10 of 13 surveyed said they disapproved.
Republican lawmakers have faced outrage at town halls across the country in recent weeks, where constituents have expressed concern about mass federal layoffs, Elon Musk’s immense influence, and high prices.
Josh Dawsey, a political investigations reporter at the Wall Street Journal, said on CNN that Trump’s advisers had urged the president to focus on the economy during his campaign but that Trump finds the economy “boring” compared with issues like immigration.
“Now you see him talk less about cost of living than other topics,” Dawsey said. “You see him sort of do these aggressive actions on trade, and I’m curious to see how the American public will respond to that, because I think one of the key reasons people put him in the White House was they thought prices were going down and that he was better than the Democrats on making their lives better.”
