The Meaning of Trump’s Working-Class ‘Buyer’s Remorse’
Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams recently conducted an innovative survey of Trump voters that was released in Jacobin. They conclude that “Donald Trump’s erratic, vindictive, and economically damaging first year in office has already given many of those same voters buyer’s remorse.” An astonishing one in five 2024 Trump voters now shun the Republicans in a prospective 2028 race.
This is a full-fledged working-class revolt, where 21 percent of Trump voters without a college degree say they are finished with Trump’s party.
How sweet is it that the groups leading the revolt are the ones Trump and the MAGA strategists thought would anchor the new Republican coalition. Fully 27 percent of Blacks and 41 percent of Hispanics now say to count them out. And in Abbott and Williams’s survey, 57 percent of “switchers” who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024 say they will not vote Republican in 2028.
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I feel vindicated by the voter, if not the political class. I have written repeatedly in The American Prospect that addressing “working-class discontent” is key to winning both the white working class and the Black and Hispanic base.
It was also key for winning Macomb County and Reagan Democrats in the 1990s. Workers wanted higher wages and health insurance, but they were also angry that hard work and responsibility were not rewarded. They wanted safer communities and for their children to have the opportunity for a good education. They wanted working people, not just the big shots, to be in charge in politics.
This understanding of working-class discontent will explain why just a fraction of these defectors are now voting Democratic. The image of the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party, worse than Trump, and even worse than ICE. It badly trails Republicans by double digits on handling crime and immigration.
How sweet is it that the groups leading the revolt are the ones Trump and the MAGA strategists thought would anchor the new Republican coalition.
I never use the words “buyer’s remorse.” It does not respect the voter and why they decided to vote for any candidate, even Trump. It implies they made a mistake when they had so many good reasons to vote for Trump at a time when two-thirds of the public thought the country was off-track.
Abbott and Williams write that working-class voters supported Trump because of “the Biden administration’s perceived failures on inflation, the cost of living, and immigration.” But it was much more personal than that. While young people, Blacks and Hispanics, and working Americans were falling behind on debts, skipping medical care and meals, and relying on payday loans and cash advances, Biden was telling them America’s economy was the “envy of the world.” Many working-class voters hated Biden.
Many Democrats, the media, and elites believed that the Biden economy was strong, and few of their candidates mentioned affordability when he was president. In my articles, I implored Democrats to focus on the cost of living.
Democrats presided over a period of spiking inequality, where the billionaires and growing monopolies used money to dominate their politics under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Abbott and Williams, the Democratic congressional caucuses, and advocacy groups mostly ignore the many reasons Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump. The elites think Trump fanned the flames of bigotry and got working-class voters to vote against their own interests.
But accepting that gender is an identity and prioritizing transgender rights made Democrats look outside the mainstream. Biden attempted to strengthen anti-discrimination laws for transgender students, but what citizens saw was a federal education policy that prioritized gender-neutral bathrooms, and Democratic states allowing transgender participants in women’s sports. Like generations before, Black and Hispanic communities want their kids to get a good public education. But over 50 percent of Hispanics intensely supported Republican attempts to bar transgender students taking part in women’s sports.
President Biden changed the order of Democratic primaries to put South Carolina first to “thank the Black voters who got me here.” Nevada, with its large Hispanic population, remained last among early-primary states. Biden’s focus on racial justice addressed the legacy of slavery. That vision of America got little audience with Hispanics who viewed America as an exceptional immigrant nation.
In my polls for the last four years, Blacks and Hispanics said Republicans were better than Democrats on handling crime. In 2022, Blacks put crime as high as the cost of living. So before taking victory laps over falling crime rates, Democratic politicians should remember last year this was the biggest worry if Kamala Harris was elected: the “border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming American cities.”
The worst news for Democrats in the study of Trump voters comes on immigration, however. Amazingly, the authors do not write about the results for one question, “Do you prefer Biden’s immigration policies or Trump’s immigration policies?” The Trump defectors still preferred Trump’s over Biden’s policies by 59 to 14 percent.
So why would any of them vote for the Democrat?
In my review of Deciding to Win in the Prospect in December 2025, I made “recommendations on how Democrats can get to commonsense positions on crime, immigration, gender identity, and American exceptionalism. That allows candidates to quiet the culture wars as they fight for the embattled working and middle class against the concentrated power of big business.”
A Century Foundation study by GQR from December 2025 found that “working-class Americans are more likely to fault corporations and the wealthy for rigging the system against them … that corporations have escaped accountability.”
There is clearly a big appetite among the working class for “banning health insurance companies from denying patients doctor-recommended care,” “banning corporate money in politics,” “breaking up corporate monopolies,” and “breaking up Big Tech firms.” The Century Foundation study shows that over 80 percent of the working class support increasing Social Security benefits by raising taxes on incomes above $180,000 and building low-cost housing. Over three-quarters support free child care, raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour, and making it easier to join unions. Those results are consistent with other surveys on raising Social Security benefits and taxes, raising the minimum wage, and strengthening labor unions.
But what does that all mean when the “buyer’s remorse” does not yet include choosing the Democrat?
The Trump defectors still preferring Trump on immigration says to me that the successful Democrat must run against his own party. They will have to offer a new vision that leaves the party trusted on crime and police, immigration, helping hard-working families, opportunity and public education, and championing an exceptional America. And they will succeed only if their vision shows them deeply dissatisfied with a politics that only works for billionaires and monopolies, not for working people and an activist government helping families.
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