Trump's Coalition is Cracking - Here's Why

Working-class voters are again feeling hurt by a combination of costs, chaos, and corruption. Democrats have an opening to make a credible case that we stand with them.

After a big win on redistricting this week in Virginia, we’re back with another update from The Working Class Project – the largest and most-extensive effort in the Democratic Party to understand why working-class voters are trending away from Democrats, and how we can win them back.

Last fall, we published a summary of our initial research and recommendations for a practical, informed path forward. Earlier this month, we launched a slate of new research through The Working Class Project — and the timing couldn’t be more urgent.

Download: The Working Class Project 2025 Report

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With midterms now in front of us, Democrats face a defining question: Can we make a credible, lasting case that we stand with working people? Not just in our rhetoric, but in our policies, our priorities, our outreach, and our willingness to be honest about where we’ve fallen short?

The data coming in right now tells a complicated but, frankly, hopeful story — if we pay attention.

Democrats are winning and over-performing in elections up and down the ballot, from coast to coast and everywhere in between. Here’s what we’re watching.

The coalition Trump built is cracking.

Trump promised he would lower costs. He said he would end foreign wars. He said he would bring back American manufacturing.

His policies have led to the opposite. And his 2024 coalition is taking note.

In 2024, white voters without a college degree supported Trump by 34 points. The lowest-income voters (households making under $50,000) broke for Trump in record numbers in 2024, with a Republican winning that group for the first time since the 1960s. But that trend is now reversing — and it’s reversing hard and fast. His approval with voters earning under $50,000 a year is now over 20 points underwater. Today, his advantage with white non-college voters has also all but evaporated — his approval rating among this group sits barely above water.

These are the voters Trump promised to rescue. He said he would “fix it.” But they’re not feeling rescued. And the economy is surely not fixed for them.

Working-class voters are again feeling hurt by a combination of costs, chaos, and corruption. The biggest driver is high costs.

But let’s be clear: working-class voters leaving Trump is not the same thing as working-class voters coming home to Democrats. That work still has to be done. It has to be earned. And it starts with recognizing what’s actually happening in people’s lives.

The tariff chaos is a tax on working people.

After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s original tariffs, 24 states filed suit to block his new global tariffs, imposed under a provision of the Trade Act of 1974 that has never before been invoked. Arizona’s Attorney General pointed to a Federal Reserve study estimating that Americans bear the cost of these tariffs at roughly $1,200 per household per year — money out of the pockets of families trying to buy groceries, pay rent, and keep small businesses afloat. The tariffs are also hurting working families in rural America, including ag interests.

That’s not a trade policy. That’s a regressive tax, and working people are still paying it more for virtually everything in their daily lives.

Health care costs are crushing working families.

A new West Health-Gallup survey of nearly 20,000 adults found that roughly one-third of Americans — the equivalent of more than 82 million people — have made at least one financial trade-off to pay for health care. The most common sacrifices included rationing prescriptions, not following medical guidance, and borrowing money — 15 percent of respondents reported each of those steps. Some cut spending on food or household utilities. And the situation is getting worse: nearly half of U.S. adults worry they will not be able to afford necessary health care in 2026 — the highest level of concern recorded since tracking began in 2021.

This will be put into further focus as Democrats remind voters of the Trump and Republican cuts coming to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

As we saw last year in our ads in Virginia, the healthcare cost issue, including Medicaid cuts, is potent. This is a working-class crisis. It is hiding in plain sight.

Trump’s war is sending gas prices through the roof.

Over one month into Trump’s war of choice with Iran, the price of gas has jumped to more than $4 per gallon nationwide – more than a dollar per gallon higher than when the fighting broke out. The cost of diesel and jet fuel is also skyrocketing. Working-class folks are already feeling these price spikes at the pump and in their pocketbooks every day – and they’ll soon start bearing the downstream effects more acutely, too: food will cost more as fertilizer and shipping costs go up; summer trips with the kids will become prohibitively expensive; small businesses will struggle.

Economists say that Trump’s war is already amounting to yet another tax on working-class people, and there’s no end in sight.

We’re onto something.

Over the coming months, The Working Class Project will be publishing new research and analysis across all of these fronts — the political realignment underway, the health care squeeze, rural hospital impacts, and the real economic costs of this administration’s agenda. We’re going to go beyond the polling and into people’s lives. And we’re going to offer new recommendations to help Democrats earn back the support of working-class voters.

The midterms are coming. The data is moving. But data doesn’t win elections — connection does. That’s what this project is about.

Stay with us.

Coming up soon: We go back to Biden-Trump voters we talked to last year to see what’s changed and how they view voting for Democrats this fall.