Inside the Trump Slump: Young, Latino and Independent Voters Sour on Trump

To keep control of the House in a midterm cycle that would typically see voters punishing the party in power, Republicans will need to keep the coalition that powered Trump to victory in 2024 — most notably Latinos, young voters, and independents — lashed together.

The Cook Political Report’s newly relaunched PollTracker, a polling aggregator that calculates a rolling daily average of Trump’s approval rating and tracks his standing within key demographic subgroups, already shows how Trump’s support with these key groups is sliding.

CPR PollTracker

For more on how the CPR PollTracker works, click here.

The CPR PollTracker finds that Trump’s net job approval rating has dropped nearly seven points since April 15, going from -3.9% to -10.7%.

In that same period of time, the negative shifts in net job approval among young voters, Latinos and independents were the most dramatic of the demographic groups our tracker measured.

For 18-to-29-year-olds, the net shift was -11.8 points, the most significant slide of any group. 

For Latinos, Trump’s approval saw a net drop of 10.4 points.

And for independents, it was a net drop of 7.9 points.

It’s worth noting that even significant slumps in the president’s popularity don’t directly translate into shifts in downballot vote choice, particularly in a deeply polarized climate. It’s no guarantee that most — or even many — Americans who ultimately sour on the current occupant of the White House will be driven into the arms of the Democratic Party come next November.

What’s more likely is that they may simply stay home. Continuing to track the president’s approval among the coalition groups that propelled him to victory in 2024 will give us a strong indication of whether those voters will show up next year to support Republicans not named Donald Trump. 
 

The demographic groups to watch 

During Trump’s popular vote victory in 2024 — the first for a Republican in two decades — he netted double-digit gains in his vote share among Hispanics (whom he lost by 33 points in 2020 but by only 5 points in 2024), voters under 30 (whom he lost by 24 points in 2020 but by only 11 points in 2024), and independents (whom he lost by 13 points in 2020 but only by 3 points four years later).

How Trump's coalition changed from 2020-2024

Those are all subgroups that are relevant not just to the national political climate, but to some of the individual races that could make the difference between Republicans narrowly holding the House, sustaining historically typical losses, or seeing the bottom fall out.

For example, Republicans will have to play offense in competitive seats like those held by Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vincente Gonzalez in Texas and Adam Gray in California — all of which feature a majority-Hispanic electorate.  

Republicans are also focused on preserving what they can of Trump’s surprisingly robust performance with younger voters, who have traditionally been firmly aligned with Democrats. Although young voters are less likely than their older counterparts to show up in non-presidential elections, the states with the highest young voter turnout in 2022 — including Michigan, Maine and Minnesota — will also host hotly contested district and statewide races next fall.

Meanwhile, Democrats’ hopes for a wave election have been buoyed as Trump’s approval rating has eroded over the past months, most notably with independent voters. In 2018, Democrats carried independents by 12 points in national exit polls, a gap that closed to just two points four years later and three points in the 2024 presidential election. If Democrats are aiming for a redux of 2018, when they picked up more than 40 House seats and notched their most significant midterm victory since 1974, they’ll have to similarly run up the score with independents in swing districts throughout the country.
 

How the Republican midterm coalition changed, 2018-2022

Another subgroup worth tracking closely is one that became foundational to Trump’s base during his first election in 2016 — white voters without a college degree. This group’s 18-point preference for Republican John McCain in 2008 exploded to a 37-point lead for Trump eight years later.

That share has been fairly consistent when Trump is on the ballot, but notably fell to an advantage only in the mid-20s in 2018 (although it recovered in 2022). If the current anxiety about Trump’s trade and economic policies calcifies into real anger that grinds down these voters’ strong affinity for the GOP, Republicans could be in for a grim November.

How does the CPR PollTracker work?

As CPR did with its head-to-head presidential polling average in 2024, this poll tracker will include a rolling average of a total of 21 national polls that we consider reliable, transparent and methodologically sound. In addition to overall presidential job approval, we will track the president’s standing among men, women, white college graduates, white non-college graduates, Black Americans, Latino Americans, 18-to-29-year-olds, seniors, Democrats, Republicans and independents.

Aggregating this demographic data is particularly useful because the sample sizes of some notable subgroups are often small, leading to margins of error that are so wide that the data becomes almost meaningless. That can translate to noisy data and often wild fluctuations from individual poll to individual poll.

But by tracking these groups over time, we can build a more stable trendline that more accurately reflects how each demographic group actually feels about the sitting president.

Methodology

The tracker will be updated daily. The Cook Political Report average includes 12 more traditional national polls that incorporate live interviews (ABC News/Wash Post, CNBC, CNN, FOX News, Gallup, Marquette Law School, NBC News, NPR/PBS/Marist, NYTimes/Siena, Quinnipiac, Suffolk/USA Today and Wall Street Journal) and nine online/large panel polls (ABC News/Ipsos, CBS News, Economist/YouGov, Harvard/Harris, Morning Consult, Pew Research Center, Reuters/Ipsos, SurveyUSA and Yahoo News).

To be included in our national polling average, a poll must:

• Meet basic transparency standards of publishing sample size and survey methodology.
• Be conducted partially or entirely in the past 60 days. Polls are weighted by recency (for example, a poll that came out of the field a day ago counts roughly twice as much as a poll that came out of the field a month ago).
• Include results among all Americans, registered voters, or likely voters. As the cycle continues and pollsters begin to employ more registered and likely voter models, we will default to the highest level of specificity; early in the cycle, we will default to surveys of adults when surveys of registered/likely voters are not available.

Because online pollsters tend to survey voters more frequently than live-interview pollsters (including some that survey voters on a rolling basis), we only include the single most recent result of each online pollster to prevent one pollster from dominating the average. Multiple surveys conducted by the same live-interview pollster may be included, provided they were all conducted in the last 60 days.