Trump is hemorrhaging swing voters —but some are doubling down

President Donald Trump is losing many of the swing voters who fueled his victory in the 2024 election — although the same study which discovered this found that some are doubling down on their support for MAGA.

"Listen, I am so pro-Trump, people just don't even understand," a Black male truck driver named Gerald told NPR in a story published on Tuesday. "The dude is amazing because he's not following the script."

After giving Trump an “A++” for his job performance, Gerald claims he supports Trump because he learned more about history through his children, and accepted that he will lose friends because of his pro-Trump posts. He also described himself as a big fan of AI and gets his news from YouTube and TikTok as well as ABC’s World News with David Muir.

Although he complained about gas prices hurting him so much that he must use his wife’s car at times to save on diesel fuel, Gerald concluded that there is nothing which could cause him to stop supporting Trump.

"I just try to do the cutting back to do, to survive, 'til we make it through it," Gerald told NPR. "It's like anything else. It's a season."

By contrast another ex-Trump voter, a 44-year-old Black man named Wally, rated Trump with an “F” when asked by NPR.

"Like, what do we have that we can hang our hat on right now?" Wally said to NPR. "We have higher gas prices."

He added, "Everyone's drowning, and like we just need to come up for air. No one's really just trying to swim to shore. We're just trying to get our head or our noses above the water."

Analyzing the results for NPR, veteran pollster Frank Luntz observed that “how they vote is how America will vote.” Because America is more polarized than ever, most voters are either staunchly for Trump or staunchly against him. Swing voters like Gerald and Wally, who previously voted for Democrats but switched to Trump in 2024, are mirrors of how swing voters will cast their ballots in future elections.

"This 7 percent of America that goes back and forth and not just back and forth between Republicans and Democrats – they'll vote for an independent candidate and they may not even vote. And that is the margin of success in the states and districts that matter," Luntz told NPR.

Of the 10 swing voters covered by NPR, only one other gave Trump a high mark; another named Quintero gave him an “A-” or “B+.” He also got one “B-,” one “C,” two “C-”s, one “D,” one “D-” and two “F”s.

The pattern that NPR identified among swing voters also exists among groups that are traditionally loyal to Trump. In a recent call to C-SPAN, a Hawaiian identified only as Thomas complained that he felt betrayed by Trump after voting for him three times.

“It’s hard for me to say this,” Thomas told NPR. “I wanted to believe Trump was the real deal for a long time.”

He added that Trump’s apparent corruption has turned him off from the president.

“Now I regret my support for him and I should’ve known better,” Thomas told C-SPAN. Describing the president as “a con man, a liar” and a man who does not “keep his promises,” Thomas argued that “he’s in office all for himself and he doesn’t even try to hide his corruption anymore.”

“He’s the worst president we’ve ever had and he’s the most corrupt president we’ve ever had,” Thomas explained. “I know it’s hard, it took me a while to be able to say that. Very difficult when you commit yourself to believing in somebody.”

While Thomas has turned on Trump because of his various scandals, reporting indicates that farmers — despite acknowledging that Trump’s tariffs, mass deportations and war against Iran have all hurt them significantly financially — by and large continue to support him.

“In a February earnings call, John Deere, the world’s largest maker of farm equipment, said it absorbed $600m in tariff-related costs in 2025 and expected that to double this year,” The Economist reported. “Dave Peters, a semi-retired corn farmer near Harlan, Iowa, reckons farmers now need four times as many acres to make the same profit. Watching his son and granddaughter ride a tractor across his field, he reflects on how much it takes to get a farm going: ‘It’s costing half a million just out the door.’”

Similarly, “Preston Jimmerson, a cotton and pecan farmer in Georgia, reckons chemicals account for about 30% of his input costs. He plans to cut back by 15%, but fears this will hurt yields. ‘Taking the fertiliser away from a crop is like taking oxygen from a human,’ he says.”

Despite these concerns, however, The Economist noted that the overwhelming majority of Trump’s farmer supporters staunchly back him despite rising gas, fertilizer and food prices. Instead they hope that he will offer them financial support so they can more easily make ends meet.

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