The Trump Coalition and Its Discontents 

What did y’all think a working-class realignment meant? Vibes, papers, essays?  

The conventional wisdom heading into 2024 was that the race between sitting Vice President Kamala Harris and the once and future President Donald Trump was going to be close. Instead, it was a clean sweep for the Trump-Vance campaign—every battleground state swung red, and Republicans even held onto a majority, albeit a historically narrow one, in the House.  

Now, with the near-mythical “first 100 days” mark of the second Trump administration behind us, this fledgling new coalition is already under stress. In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, half of all women and of voters under age thirty “strongly” disapproved of the job Donald Trump is doing so far in his second stint in the Oval Office. That’s to be expected. But when more voters without a college degree disapprove of his performance than approve of it, when 46 percent of seniors “strongly” disapprove, and when 10 percent of voters who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024 now say they disapprove of his performance, hazard lights are clearly flashing.   

Many of the wounds are self-inflicted. Tariffs, hastily imposed and haphazardly negotiated over, threaten not just the stock market, but families’ purchasing power and businesses that rely on inputs brought in from overseas (which is to say, nearly all of them). Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts have injected an intended sense of instability through swaths of the federal bureaucracy, including some departments and agencies that serve the low- and middle-income voters who make up a large chunk of the Trump coalition. With some truly excellent, many good, and some foolhardy, the White House’s rapid-fire barrage of various executive orders and legal actions has been like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates—you never know what you’re going to get. Picking unnecessary fights around immigration has sapped some goodwill.  

As a result, the president’s second honeymoon seems to be fading; according to one tracker, President Trump’s approval rating sits just two percentage points above where it was at the same point during his first administration. Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has helped the Republican party realign along educational lines; the defining cleavage in American politics has essentially become class, not race. And, as I wrote for Public Discourse the week after the votes were tallied, “the new, working-class coalition powering the GOP is less interested in the social conservative causes that have traditionally had a seat at the table in Republican politics.”  

So before we close the book on the 2024 election, some of the higher-quality data around last year’s electorate are starting to allow us to test that hypothesis. The American National Election Studies, one of the most reliable and longest-running election surveys, recently released their preliminary 2024 data, giving us a deeper understanding of the 2024 Trump coalition than often-flawed exit polls. The exact numbers may change as the ANES team updates its research, but the preliminary data can at least give us some initial insights into how voters were thinking about the options in front of them last November.  

The first thing that pops out at any observer is that 2024 was the year that our nation’s educational cleavage went on full display. Among voters with a college degree, a little over one-third of older men supported President Trump in 2024. For everyone else with sheepskin on their wall, Vice President Harris cleaned up. The problem for her, of course, was that there are simply not enough college-educated Americans to flesh out a political majority. (For comparison’s sake, I cut off the data to include voters at twenty-two years of age and older because vanishingly few eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds have a four-year degree.)  

Trump was especially toxic among highly educated younger women, partly due, undoubtedly, to the Dobbs decision. But working-class women were more likely to vote like working-class men, albeit at slightly lower levels, than to pattern their votes after college-educated women. The much-vaunted gender gap was the dog that didn’t bark. 

For the issues that most concern many Public Discourse readers, this could have a number of implications. Does that mean that voters without college degrees, who tend to be considered low-information voters by political scientists, didn’t care as much about abortion? Are they more pro-life to begin with? Or did Trump’s attempts to position himself as a moderate convince voters to overlook their policy disagreements on social issues because of his successful rhetoric around immigration and grocery prices?  

The ANES survey can help provide some suggestive evidence. In the chart below, each cell shows the share of respondents that fall into a given bucket—their own preferred view on abortion, and that which they ascribed to President Trump (each four-by-four square sums to 100). A full 30 percent of adults with a college degree said both that they believe abortion should always be up to the woman’s choice, and that the view that best described Donald Trump on abortion was that he believed it should never be allowed. Degree-holders were slightly more likely to incorrectly assume Trump wanted to ban all abortions, rather than correctly identifying his stated preference for the “three exceptions” (rape, incest, and the life of the mother).

Regardless of how it may have infuriated more philosophically consistent pro-life thinkers, Trump’s finger seems to have been squarely on the pulse of his working-class coalition, with roughly one-third of those respondents preferring the three exceptions over more stringent bans. But pro-lifers should also beware: while nearly six in ten respondents with a four-year degree said they thought abortion should “solely” be a personal choice, a plurality of non-college respondents also said the same.  

Other demographic characteristics play a role. Because marriage is now more common among college-educated voters, who skew Left, than among non-college-educated Americans, a majority of married women with a college degree take a progressive approach to abortion regulations. So, too, do a majority of never or formerly married women, both with and without a college degree. If you break that down further, to married Trump voters, the difference between college-educated and non-college-educated voters’ stances on abortion disappears to statistical insignificance. But it is not the case that marriage in and of itself leads women (or men) to systematically favor a pro-life position.  

The Harris campaign put a lot of stock in the idea that Dobbs would inspire women to deny Trump’s return to the White House. That didn’t happen, suggesting that the salience of the issue has indeed faded since the Supreme Court’s decision back in June 2022. But the underlying data continue to provide evidence that the underlying public opinion on the issue has shifted away from the pro-life position compared to the relative stasis of the decades before Dobbs. Just because voters weren’t voting with abortion top of mind doesn’t mean they agree with pro-lifers.  

There were other issues, of course, in which the Trump campaign was able to position itself on the mainstream side of public opinion. Protecting women’s sports proved incredibly popular, and progressives’ inability to talk about it in a way that didn’t sound like a gender theory seminar clearly cost them. Nearly half of women with a college degree who voted for Harris felt that states shouldn’t pass laws protecting women’s sports from transgender athletes—and they were virtually on an island compared to everyone else. Republican fathers with a college degree were extremely fired up to protect their daughters’ chances at a soccer scholarship. 

There are other indicators that college-educated progressive women are outliers when it comes to cultural issues. The ANES survey asks respondents whether “many women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.” Among females with a college degree who voted for President Trump, nearly half agreed at least a little with that sentiment, support more than three times as high as that of their peers who voted for Vice President Harris. When asked about language policing and sensitivity, one-quarter of female Harris supporters (both with and without a college degree) agreed with the sentiment that “the way people talk needs to change a lot.” Men, and women who voted for Trump, were far less likely to agree, particularly men with a college degree who supported the president.  

All of this suggests a gender gap opening up, not even necessarily on the issues themselves, but on how progressive young women relate to the rest of society. The ANES data is just the latest to show a remarkable rise in non-heterosexual orientations for young women. Thirteen percent of female Harris voters (of all ages) considered their sexual orientation to be something other than straight, compared to 5.6 percent of female Trump voters. (Rates of non-heterosexuality were also twice as high among Harris-voting males compared to Trump supporters, though at lower levels.) 

Of course, other gaps exist as well, even at the level of basic social trust. Among respondents with a bachelor’s degree or more, approximately half of both Trump and Harris voters with a college degree say you can trust other people all or most of the time. Among Trump voters without a college degree, it’s a little over a third. And among the least engaged, most disconnected pockets of society—adults without a college degree who didn’t vote for either candidate in 2024—only about one in seven respondents said you could trust others the majority of the time.  

Trump was able to tap into some of that cultural discontent, activating young men across racial lines through a proactive media strategy and eschewing some of the “preachier” aspects of the religious Right. A Republican presidential candidate endorsing a state ballot measure to legalize marijuana would have been unthinkable in generations past, but Trump was happy to support Florida’s move to permit legal weed (which failed, thanks to the state’s supermajority requirements). A quiet endorsement of young men’s getting high and losing hours and years to aimless Grateful Dead sessions may not be good for encouraging a healthy culture, but it does seem to have tapped into the post-religious strains on the Right. Tacking to the cultural mainstream may sand off some of the distinctive social views that kept some voters from swinging red in the past, but it also raises the stakes for the GOP’s economic agenda. And its demonstrated tendency toward chaos—rather than, say, focusing on lowering consumer prices—may well show why the honeymoon has been short-lived.  

There will be plenty of potential wins for conservatives to cheer for over the next four years. Retrenching against progressive overreach, even to the level of overturning past presidential actions on affirmative action once thought untouchable, may leave many on the Right with much to appreciate.  

Yet the tectonic plates remain shifting away from the pro-life and pro-family movement. If nothing else, the ANES data should be yet another reminder that there is no longer any “great silent majority” of socially conservative voters. We are, at best, coalition partners with a political movement that has the tendency to default into a lifestyle libertarianism and the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of the tech bro.  

This makes the White House’s tendency to measure once and cut twice a challenge for conservative governance efforts. Delivering for working-class voters should mean thinking about how to improve government, rather than just taking a chainsaw to it. If the Trump administration were able to steady itself and forgo some of the more chaotic implementation of its bigger policy swings, it could give key personnel much-needed space to translate its distinctive, populist energies into a sound—and popular—governing agenda.  

Image by Gage Skidmore, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons