Trump Voters Are Over It
Tomas Montoya has sold festival foods—funnel cakes, burgers, hot dogs—across the American Southwest for years. But lately, business has been rough. Costs are up, so he’s increased his prices. Employees are begging for hours he can’t give them. In Arizona, where he lives, Montoya pays $6 a gallon to fill up his food trucks with diesel. This summer, he may have to skip the California leg of his festival route because fuel is even more expensive there.
“It’s Trump,” Montoya told us outside a popular Hispanic grocery store in Casa Grande, Arizona, much of which sits in one of the most evenly divided House districts in the country. Montoya voted for President Trump in 2024, but now, well, frustrated doesn’t begin to cover how he’s feeling. The president is bragging about the economy, even though everyone Montoya knows is hurting; he promised to stop wars, but started one in Iran. “When Trump opens his mouth, three-quarters of what he says is stories, lies,” Montoya said. He’s planning to vote in the midterm elections this fall. But he may not choose a Republican.
You can’t flip a funnel cake in this part of Arizona without spattering someone who sounds just like Montoya—anxious, and a little regretful about how they voted two Novembers ago. These days, a shocking number of the president’s supporters have turned against him. Some of Trump’s fanboys in the libertarian-leaning manosphere have spent the past year baffled by his actions on the Epstein files, immigration, and now Iran. And in the past week, religious conservatives have been criticizing their once-unassailable leader after he posted a photo on social media of himself as Jesus and attacked the pope, calling the first American pontiff “WEAK on Crime.” Some Republican operatives in battleground states told us that they’d rather Trump not campaign too hard for their candidate; others have seen their small-dollar donations plummet.
[Read: The manosphere turns on Trump ]
Midterm elections are typically rough for an incumbent president’s party. But this year threatens to be brutal. Trump’s approval is lower right now than it was at this point ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats won back the House in a historic blue wave. Almost every new poll is a red flag for Republicans: Independents, young voters, and Latinos—groups that were crucial to Trump’s win in 2024—aren’t in the bag anymore. Even non-college-educated white Americans, once the president’s strongest group, have turned on him, according to a CNN polling average. Democratic-leaning voters are 17 points more likely than GOP-aligned voters to say they’re “extremely motivated” to vote in November.
Many Trump voters, in other words, have had it. At this point, it seems safe to declare that the historic coalition that powered the president’s second reelection is finished—kaput. The question is whether, with seven months to go until the midterms, any semblance of it can be revived.
Casa Grande, a pit stop between Tucson and Phoenix where agricultural fields give way to new subdivisions, is on the northwestern edge of Arizona’s swingy Sixth Congressional District. In 2024, Trump won here by less than a point, after losing the district by less than a point four years earlier. The area is currently represented by Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who narrowly won his two terms in Congress and who outperformed Trump by a slim margin in 2024. Ciscomani is up for reelection again this year, but what we heard from some of his constituents may not give him much reason to be optimistic about his prospects.
Shoppers outside the market bemoaned the rising price of everything: gas, meat, store-made chicharrones ($9.29 for a big bag). And they were ready to punish Trump’s party for it. Traci Calvo, a 61-year-old Democrat living on a fixed income, said she’s poorer today than she was in 2024, when she voted for Trump, believing he would bring down prices. High gas prices mean that she is staying home more often—skipping Bible studies at her church, volunteering less, and even missing exercise classes. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran was her breaking point with the president. “I think that he just wants war,” she said. “He’s made it plain that he’s adversarial with everybody.” She doesn’t plan on voting for Ciscomani, or any other Republican for that matter, in November.
The mood among voters was just as grim some 60 miles southeast in Oro Valley, a northern suburb of Tucson known for its scenic mountain views—and home to many conservative voters whom Ciscomani and statewide Republicans rely on. Sitting inside of her car after a shopping spree at a dollar store, Zuriel Reyes told us she feels “shitty” about having voted for Trump in 2024, her first-ever election. “I don’t really trust our government anymore,” the 19-year-old said, taking a bite from a Slim Jim. She’s signed up to go into the Army next year and feels like the president is “putting all our lives in jeopardy with this weird war game that he’s playing.”
[Read: Public anger is rising]
The conflict with Iran has disappointed plenty of others who once supported the president, including some who are much more firmly planted in MAGA world. On Easter Sunday, Trump’s threat to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran drew ire from many onetime Trump devotees, such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, who subsequently declared on her SiriusXM radio show that she was “sick of this shit.”
Earlier this week, when Trump posted the AI image of himself dressed in flowing robes, surrounded by a heavenly glow while healing a sick man, he alienated the one group of Americans that has rarely left his side: Christian conservatives. The picture, declared the Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham, was “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy.” Joel Webbon, a far-right pastor who believes that women should be stripped of their right to vote, concluded that Trump is “currently demon possessed.” Riley Gaines, an anti-trans activist who has appeared at Trump rallies and whom the president has previously called a “tremendous athlete,” wrote that “God shall not be mocked.”
Trump deleted the post and said that the image was “me as a doctor.” But he also doubled down, as he tends to do, when asked to respond to his critics. “I didn’t listen to Riley Gaines,” he told one reporter. “I’m not a big fan of Riley, actually.”
Perhaps the storm cloud of negativity hanging over the president explains why his planned appearance in Arizona tomorrow will be so short. From touchdown to wheels up, Trump is scheduled to spend just two hours in Phoenix, we learned, a remarkably quick visit compared with his previous hours-long rallies featuring never-ending parades of MAGA loyalists. (He is also scheduled to appear at an event in Las Vegas today.) Some Republican operatives who expect to soon face highly competitive races want the president in and out of Arizona as quickly as possible. “When Trump comes out for a rally, he dominates the news the day before, the day of, and the day after,” one GOP consultant told us. “It’s a reminder for voters of why they’re angry.” (Though it’s better that Trump visits now, this person added, than in, say, October.) Despite this, all but one of Arizona’s Republican members of Congress, David Schweikert, will attend the event hosted by the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Trump will highlight economic accomplishments in Nevada and Arizona. The president has been clear about “temporary disruptions” as a result of the war in Iran, Desai said in a written statement, “but tens of millions of Americans benefitting this tax season from the President’s signature provisions in the Working Families Tax Cuts—no tax on tips, overtime, or Social Security—reflect how the Administration hasn’t lost focus on delivering on our affordability agenda at home.” Ciscomani is scheduled to speak at the Phoenix rally. “Juan is focused on delivering results for Southern Arizona and getting things done. It’s why he was independently ranked the most effective member of Congress from Arizona,” his spokesperson, Daniel Scarpinato, told us in a statement.
Trump—or, more accurately, the conditions Trump has helped create—also seems to have affected GOP fundraising. Some donors are giving half the amount that they would normally contribute to Republican candidates and blaming economic instability for the decrease, one Georgia county GOP chair told us. Two Republican consultants from another battleground state told us that small-dollar donations to their candidates plummeted in early March, days after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes across Iran. In races that could be decided by very thin margins, these donations could mean the difference between sending out a final round of mailers to low-propensity voters or not. “If this is a two-week stretch, not a huge deal,” one of the consultants, who requested anonymity to discuss internal campaign dynamics, said. “If we’re still bombing Iran in November? I mean …”
[Read: It’s not just Iran. Trump is flailing on multiple fronts.]
The ifs are plentiful. Theoretically, if the war in Iran winds down quickly, if gas prices drop, and if food becomes more affordable, some Americans may feel reassured enough to rally behind Republicans once more. It’s not as though many of Trump’s critics are eager to vote for Democrats. “Trump could drop a nuke and I’d still vote Republican,” Kelly said recently. Gaines, after learning that the president doesn’t actually like her, wrote on X that “I love the President” and that she will “continue to support him and the America First agenda.”
But the president and his party may find salvaging the broader Trump coalition difficult. In Casa Grande, Montoya told us he’d give Trump three weeks to end the war and fix the economy. In the meantime, he’s eating leftovers more often, putting fewer miles on his food trucks, and setting the air-conditioning higher than he’d like as Arizona temperatures climb. Montoya will also, he added, be researching his options for November.