MAGA diehards across some of the nation’s most competitive congressional districts are turning on President Donald Trump, with even three-time Trump voters ready to ditch him.
The warning comes from a series of late-August conversations NBC News conducted with voters in eight of the country’s most competitive congressional districts, stretching along Interstate 80 from central New Jersey to Omaha, Nebraska. Reporters found a new willingness among Trump voters to voice complaints about inflation, his war on Iran, and his outsized White House ballroom, even in places that voted heavily for him.
“Everything has just gotten more expensive,” said online perfume seller Louis Marcelino, 38, who has voted for Trump three times. He spoke from a barbershop in the Pocono Mountains foothills, where Trump held an affordability rally in December in an ill-fated bid to quell concern about kitchen-table issues.
“I don’t think he realizes it, but every single American here is paying the price for that war,” Marcelino added. He also said he isn’t sure he’ll even vote in November, but if he does, in Republican-heavy Hazleton, Pennsylvania, it may be to slow down Trump’s agenda. “I think the block right now might be beneficial for all of us,” he said.
Rich Ehrhardt, 55, a businessman from Nazareth, Pennsylvania, said he isn’t pleased after voting for Trump three times. “I don’t like the way the war is being handled,” he said outside a diner. “I think he went against some of his promises.”
On Iran, Ehrhardt said Trump should “do what you said you were going to do. No forever wars and tell us what you are doing to get us out. Don’t make up things that we want to hear.”
Public polling shows consistent majorities disapproving of Trump’s job performance, with approval ranging from the low 30s to the low 40s across surveys, and fewer than half of Republicans said they “strongly approve” of him in a Reuters/Ipsos survey released this month.
Bob Gorra, 89, a retiree outside a diner in Morris County, New Jersey, said he’s troubled by what he sees as ongoing corruption in Washington and the failure to control costs for consumers.
“I used to be a Trump man,” Gorra said. “But I think what’s happened right now is terrible for the people of the United States. Terrible, you know, with the inflation and the fact that too many people are starving, too many are poor.”
Darcey Liljequist, 75, a retired nurse’s aide in Davenport, Iowa, and three-time Trump voter, said the decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom revealed a selfish side to Trump that she had somehow missed. “It’s kind of like he’s being a king instead of a president,” she said, adding that she wants Trump, who has called the affordability crisis a “hoax,” to “go live with a senior citizen living on $1,500 a month in Social Security—see how we have to live.”
The White House pushed back. Spokeswoman Olivia Wales said Trump “has signed the largest middle-class tax cuts in history, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, sealed the border, driven violent crime to the lowest level in nearly a century, unleashed an energy revolution and sent American 401(k)s climbing to record highs.”
Not every voter has soured. Katie Heinz, 49, an interior designer in Medina, Ohio, and another three-time Trump voter, said he’s “doing a good job,” though she wished “he didn’t” “ruffle feathers” so often.
The discontent comes as Republicans face fresh warnings of “historic losses” in the midterms, with a new polling aggregate showing the party trailing in eight major Senate battlegrounds, including once-reliable red states Texas and Ohio, just two months before Election Day.
The White House has been approached for comment.
