Buyer's remorse rising among Trump voters as approval ratings decline, UMass poll shows

Buyer's remorse is rising among Americans who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 — vividly illustrating the “clear, consistent signs” that his political base is crumbling, according to survey results released Monday.

About one in six Trump voters told pollsters from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst that they wouldn't vote for him again, as the president's overall approval rating fell to a dismal 32 percent.

“There are no takebacks in electoral politics, but around 15 percent of Trump voters now tell us they might or would vote differently or not vote at all if they had it to do over again,” the poll's co-director, Alexander Theodoridis, said in a prepared statement.

“This is hardly a mass exodus from the Trump tent, but is enough that it certainly could’ve been decisive against Trump in what was a relatively close 2024 election,” Theodoridis added. “More notably, though, there are now clear, consistent signs of an erosion trend.”

In response to an inquiry from The Independent, the White House pointed to a Sunday social media post in which Trump said, “THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT.”

Just 58 percent of Trump voters said they felt very confident they made the "right choice" in 2024, down from 74 percent in April 2025, according to the UMass poll results.

The number who said they now had mixed feelings about their vote surged to 9 percent, more than double the 4 percent who said the same thing in April 2025.

Those who said they “might choose differently today” or “would vote differently if I could” also increased to 3 percent in both categories, up from 1 and 2 percent, respectively, over the same period.

And Trump voters who said they wish they hadn’t cast a presidential ballot skyrocketed from 1 to 6 percent.

The number of self-identified Republicans who said they approve of Trump’s job performance fell to 75 percent, representing an accelerating decline from 89 percent in April 2025, 84 percent in July 2025 and 81 percent in March of this year.

The number of all respondents who said they strongly approved of Trump's job performance fell by one-third, to 14 percent from 21 percent in July 2025, while those who said they only somewhat approved ticked up slightly, from 17 to 18 percent over the same period.

Just 7 percent said Trump has performed “very well” in handling inflation, which rose 3.4 percent during the 12 months that ended on July 31, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Consumer Price Index annual inflation rate was around 2.9 percent when Trump took office in January 2025.

On Friday, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh — who Trump nominated in January — signaled that interest rates were likely to rise soon because inflation remained well above the Fed's target rate of 2 percent for its preferred measure of consumer spending, which was up an annual 3.7 percent in July, according to the Commerce Department.

The UMass poll also showed that support for Trump's handling of Iran fell to just 10 percent among respondents who said he was doing "very well," down from 21 percent in July 2025 and 16 percent in March, shortly after he launched his ongoing war against the Islamic Republic without congressional approval.