The recent midterm elections in the United States revealed a fragmentation in President Donald Trump's most loyal base, the American white working class and young white men without higher education.
Although talking about the loss of this Republican electoral pillar is, to say the least, hasty, the results of the polls in the so-called midterms showed that also in these sectors that have been so closely aligned with the Trumpist movement there is dissatisfaction with Trump 2.0's policies.
In votes for the House, in which Democrats won a majority of at least 253 seats out of a total of 435, Trump's loyal base constituted the only demographic group that allocated more votes to Republicans than to Democrats. Still, there were fewer votes than in 2024, when Trump was elected.
The average of the entire electorate shows a migration of 15 percentage points towards the Democrats, who ended up with 56% of the votes. Among whites without higher education, that is, the working class, there was a 14-point migration to the Democrats, even though Republicans took 59% of support.
Among white men, even though 56% supported Trump's party, there was a 15-point migration to the Democrats. And among the white electorate aged 18 to 29, there was a 30-point migration to the Democrats, who ended up with 60% of this subgroup's support. The data comes from projections from The New York Times.
In other words, these groups continue to be the most loyal to Trump and the Republicans, but they are fragmenting. Voting intention polls prior to Americans going to the polls already showed this. But Trump, from the Oval Office of the White House, said that this base would guarantee him another victory.
In October, on the eve of the elections, a NYT poll showed that 46% of the white working class disapproved of Trump; Also among them, 53% said they disapproved of the president's management of the economy. It is a very different scenario from that observed in the 2018 midterms, when Trump was halfway through his first term. At the time, 65% of this group said they approved of Trump's handling of the economy.
It is not difficult to calculate, therefore, that the economy is the factor that has fragmented the Maga base at the moment.
"This undoubtedly has to do with the price of diesel and the effect of trade tariffs," says Jorge Antonio Alvez, professor of political science at the City University of New York. "But even more interesting is that corruption was important or crucial for the majority of voters. There is an effect of the perception of private benefits for the president and his family that is helping to soften the support of this base."
The economic scenario speaks for itself. The price of gasoline is on the rise, largely due to the war in Iran. The average price per gallon (about 3.8 liters) was US$2.7 in January, before the start of the conflict in the Middle East. In May, it exceeded US$4.3. At the beginning of November, it is almost US$4, according to official data. For diesel, the jump was even more significant: US$ 3.6 in January, US$ 5.5 in May and, finally, US$ 6.2 now.
The tariffs imposed on imports by Trump also carried weight, especially high for states like those in the former Rust Belt, the historic base of the working class. In Michigan, tariffs have cost the state $27 billion so far; If divided by the number of homes, the average weight for each family is US$6,480. The data is from the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
Driven by rising fuel prices, tariffs and also the boom in investment in artificial intelligence, inflation increased. The annual accumulated rate in September was 3.7%, after rising 3.4% in August. This erodes families' purchasing power and impacts the area that has been most mentioned in the US in recent months: the cost of living.
Still, academics say that caution is needed when measuring the rupture of this base. “The change in voting could be a mix of two things: many dissatisfied Republicans not going out to vote and a more modest group actually changing their vote,” says Ernesto Calvo, professor of politics at the University of Maryland.
In other words, in a country in which voting is not mandatory and in which a large part of the parties' work is to convince voters to leave home and go to the polls, it is possible that Democratic support grew because voters who were not very enthusiastic decided to abstain, and the sample of voters, therefore, may have been dominated by those who decided to support the opposition.
Calvo also states that it is necessary to consider that many voters may accept supporting Democrats for Congress, but remain loyal to Republicans for the Presidency.
In this scenario, the question is where this base would migrate to. “What this reveals is that the hard base of Trumpism is proving to be more diverse and less attached to the Republican Party,” says Alvez. "What is difficult to say for sure is whether this is a search for a more centrist candidate, or someone who truly represents the movement."
If the chosen line is the second, there is one name that stands out, that of Vice President J. D. Vance. Vance became known for a book he wrote, "Hillbilly Elegy" (something like "hillbilly lament"), in which he talks precisely about a slice of the USA, the old Belt, affected by the dismantling of industries, which impoverished the population.
It is the basis of a resentment that helped the white working class migrate its vote from Democrats, as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, to Republicans. Vance is one of the most popular names to potentially be the Republican candidate for the White House in 2028.
And in these midterms, unlike his boss, the vice president at least publicly demonstrated that he understood the message of the polls and stated that the blame for the Republican collapse in the midterms was the war in Iran and the rise in the cost of living.
Furthermore, academics point to the fact that Trump's support base was not on his side only because of economic promises, but, perhaps to an even greater extent, because of racial factors.
“Access to power at the expense of other racial groups is the preferred political bargaining chip of the lower-class white population,” wrote Saida Grundy, a sociology professor at Boston University, in an opinion piece on the topic in the British newspaper The Guardian in June.
Thus, it is necessary to consider that the ideological realignment, on a large scale based on a racial debate, was what helped in the migration of white working-class voters to the Republican Party in recent decades. Economics may be helping to fragment this base, but the total picture is much more complex.
