One in eight Trump voters may be regretting their pick: poll

Because Trump's margin of victory was so narrow in 2016, he has very little wiggle room when it comes to support

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published July 20, 2017 10:45AM (EDT)

 (AP/Charles Krupa)
(AP/Charles Krupa)

If President Donald Trump were running for reelection today, he would have a hard time convincing nearly one-eighth of his previous supporters to back him.

A new poll by Reuters/Ipsos discovered that Trump's first six months in the White House has taken a toll on the enthusiasm of the people who voted for him. Although 88 percent of the survey respondents said they would vote for Trump again, 7 percent said that they didn't know, 4 percent said they would vote for other people and 1 percent said they would not vote at all.

According to Reuters:

Some were tired of his daily trolling of Democrats, the media and the judiciary. Some were disappointed that the Trump administration has not yet swept illegal immigrants out of their communities. Others said the president has not ended the mistrust and hyper-partisanship in Washington as much as they had hoped.

Although it's not unusual for presidents to see some dip in the support of their base voters after taking office, Trump has very little margin for error because he won by such a narrow vote in the electoral college. What's more, much of the support he has retained can be attributed to the fact that he's still relatively new in office, meaning that the passions of the movement which elected him still run strong.

As Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told Reuters, "People are still invested in the choices they made" and "they’re not about to admit that they’re wrong, at least not yet."

In similar news, a recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll found that 55 percent of Americans believed Trump had not made significant progress in his goals as president, 50 percent think he is doing a worse job than previous presidents and 60 percent believe the Russian government tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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