Is Trump’s Coalition Falling Apart Faster Than Anyone Expected?

A year after Trump’s “new coalition” shocked the political world, it’s falling apart. Young men, Latinos, and reluctant 2024 Trump voters are bailing — fast.

There is a liberal fantasy that Emperor Trump will one day have his no-clothes moment, when the fact that he is a con man, a fraud, and a clown becomes apparent to all. This idea — that we are just one revelation away from millions of Trump supporters taking off their MAGA hats and seeing the light — is the undercurrent of so much Trump discourse on MSNBC and elsewhere.

That moment is never coming. Polarization and partisanship are powerful drugs, and most of Trump’s base would follow him off a cliff rather than admit his critics were right. However, the coalition that put him back in office just over a year ago appears to be on the verge of collapse.

This is a stunning reversal. After the election, Trump and his allies argued that his victory presaged a generation of Republican dominance. By making gains with Latinos, young voters, and others, they said Trump was on the verge of checkmating the Democrats.

But in less than a year, the voters who powered Trump’s win are abandoning him at record speed. That has dramatic implications for American politics in both the short and long term.

The 2025 Warning Sign

Back in 2023, the Biden White House pushed back on the President’s poor poll numbers by pointing to huge Democratic wins in special and off-year elections. The argument was: “Don’t trust the polls, trust the election results.”

This was an intellectually disingenuous argument, because Democrats were winning those elections based on turnout differential, not persuasion. In other words, Democrats were turning out at a higher rate than Republicans in lower-turnout elections. That advantage was mathematically impossible to replicate in a presidential election.

So in the aftermath of the recent big Democratic victories in the blue states of New Jersey, Virginia, and California, many assumed this was once again Democrats benefitting from their base of higher-propensity voters.

Nope.

There is substantial evidence that critical groups of Trump supporters crossed over and voted for Democrats.