gotchanewsdaily.com 
CNN
—
Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the presidential election was provided largely by voters who retain significant doubts about his character, policy agenda or both.
Results from the major surveys of voters’ choices on Election Day show that a substantial minority of people who voted for Trump worried that he is too extreme, lacks honesty or would steer the country toward authoritarianism. Trump also won many voters who disagree with some of his top policy priorities, including his pledge to execute the largest deportation ever of undocumented immigrants, according to both the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations that includes CNN and the AP VoteCast survey conducted by the NORC at the University of Chicago.
For these conflicted Trump voters, both surveys show, those concerns were overshadowed by discontent over the outcomes of Joe Biden’s presidency and the belief that Trump would produce better results than Vice President Kamala Harris on the issues they cared most about: immigration, crime and, above all, inflation and the cost of living.
The long-term implications of Trump’s 2024 victory may turn on whether his performance in office solidifies or severs his connection to those conflicted supporters. If voters conclude that Trump has delivered on his core campaign promises of securing the border, increasing public safety and providing more economic stability, strategists in both parties believe the GOP has the opportunity to cement the formidable gains he registered this year among several traditionally Democratic-leaning voter groups, including younger White men, Black men and Latino people overall.
“If he has a record of success he can point to, the stage is set to continue to expand the Republican coalition,” said Jim McLaughlin, a lead pollster for Trump’s campaign.
Trump clearly is entering the White House in a stronger position than after his first election in 2016. His popular vote win – the only time he has done so since he first entered politics – has given his 2024 victory more legitimacy and most voters are expressing optimism he will improve their personal finances. And while Trump faced skepticism during his first term from the GOP leaders in the House (Paul Ryan) and Senate (Mitch McConnell), now the party’s leadership in both chambers shows little inclination to cross him.
Meanwhile, on the Supreme Court, his three appointments have created a solid conservative majority that is more likely to back him than the closely divided court he inherited when he arrived in office. Business leaders who kept their distance the first time have trekked to Mar-a-Lago to signal their desire to work with him. And Trump’s gains among traditionally Democratic-leaning constituencies, especially non-White men, have left the party much more tentative about how to oppose him this time around.
But once Trump takes office again, he faces the risk that at least some of his conflicted supporters will recoil as the elements of his personality and program that still concerned them on Election Day inevitably receive more attention. That risk will be greatly compounded for Trump if voters don’t see improvement on the issues they care most about – particularly their cost of living.
“Nothing that Trump has talked about doing, whether it’s tariffs, tax cuts for wealthy people or the deportation plan, none of that is going to help people’s pocketbooks,” argued Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, chief strategy officer for Way to Win, a liberal group that focuses on electing progressive candidates of color. “And so that is an opening to hold him accountable on that, to educate people about that.”
Uneasy about Trump’s agenda
On a wide array of measures, the exit polls and AP VoteCast show that Trump won a crucial slice of voters who continued to express substantial unease about him and/or his agenda.
In the exit polls, about 1 in 8 voters who described Trump as “too extreme” still voted for him. In the VoteCast survey, which phrased the question slightly differently, Trump won fully one-fifth of voters who said they were either very or somewhat concerned that his views were too extreme. Likewise, in the VoteCast survey, Trump won 1 in 6 voters who expressed concern that he would steer the country in an authoritarian direction. Trump won almost exactly the same share of voters who said in the VoteCast survey that he lacks the moral character to serve as president.
The same pattern held on key issues. In both the exit polls and VoteCast surveys, about 3 in 10 voters who said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances voted for Trump. In both surveys, that was a slightly higher percentage of pro-choice voters who supported Trump than in the 2020 election – before three of the justices he nominated to the Supreme Court provided critical votes to overturn the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
In both surveys, Trump also won a vital segment of voters who opposed his plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. In the exit polls, Trump won just over 1 in 5 voters who said most undocumented immigrants should not be deported but rather given an opportunity to apply for legal status; VoteCast put his support among voters who opposed mass deportation at 1-in-4.
Even among the voter groups most directly affected by these policies, Trump won substantial support from people who disagreed with him. In the exit polls, Trump won nearly one-fourth of Latinos who opposed mass deportation and slightly more than one-fourth of women who said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. That was, again, an increase from 2020, when the exit polls found that Trump won only about one-fifth of women who supported legal abortion. On both issues, the AP VoteCast survey produced very similar results.
All of this support was decisive in Trump’s victory. Whether in the exit polls or VoteCast, most voters said they worried Trump was too extreme, lacked the character to serve as president, or would steer the country in an authoritarian direction. Most in both surveys also opposed mass deportation and supported legal abortion. In the VoteCast survey, a clear majority of voters said they wanted the federal government to do more to expand access to health insurance and exactly half said they wanted government to do more to provide access to childhood vaccines – neither of which is likely under Trump. Without support from a substantial minority of the voters who held those negative or contrary views, Trump could not have won.
Fixing the economy
Above all, the key to Trump’s success among these divided voters was their discontent over the economy, and their belief that Trump would improve their financial situation.
Molly Murphy, a lead pollster for Harris, told me that she believed voters who thought Trump would improve conditions on the issue they cared most about – usually inflation, but also in some cases reinforced by immigration or crime – minimized any of these other personal or policy concerns about him.
“If they thought that Trump was going to be better on their primary concern… They either forgave the other concerns or convinced themselves that” the elements of the Trump agenda they disliked “just won’t happen,” Murphy said.
The major post-election surveys support that analysis. Exit polls results provided by the CNN polling unit show that Trump won one-third of the voters who said he was too extreme, but also said they were financially worse off than they were when he left office. (Among those who said their financial situation was even unchanged from four years ago, Trump only won 1 in every 11 voters who called him too extreme.) In the VoteCast survey, Trump similarly won 3 in 10 voters who said he lacked the moral character to serve as president, but who also described the economy as not so good or poor. (Less than 1 in 14 voters who believed Trump lacked moral character and were positive on the economy voted for him.)
The economy’s critical role in offsetting doubts on other fronts about Trump is most apparent when looking at the role of abortion in the election. In 2022, as I wrote at the time, abortion did not overcome the Republican tilt of voters in red states such as Florida and Texas, but did prove a huge asset for Democrats in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.
But Harris didn’t win nearly as many pro-choice voters this time as Democratic gubernatorial and Senate candidates did then – or even, as noted above, as Biden did in 2020, long before the overturning of Roe v. Wade. McLaughlin, the Trump pollster, attributes that shift largely to the former president’s success at convincing voters he would not seek a national abortion ban and would leave the issue to the states.
“Democrats kind of snuck up on the Republicans in ’22 with the abortion issue,” McLaughlin said. “And the Trump campaign made it a real emphasis to say we don’t support a national abortion ban. In most states, people were comfortable with the abortion laws, it had become a state’s right issues, and Donald Trump was not a threat to them on that issue.”
But the election polls also made clear that many voters who supported abortion rights simply put more stress on the economy. Fully 36% of all voters said in the exit polls that they supported legal abortion in all or most circumstances, but also viewed the economy in negative terms. In many respects, as I’ve written, that was the collision of Harris’s greatest strength – the fear that Trump would rescind voters’ rights – against Trump’s – the belief that the Biden-Harris administration had mismanaged the economy. The exit polls found that Trump narrowly beat Harris among those pro-choice, economically-pessimistic voters, while the VoteCast survey gave Harris a tiny advantage among them. In either case, the result was that Trump won far too many voters who supported legal abortion for Harris to prevail.
“On abortion specifically, I think those voters either concluded through his messaging or through their magical thinking that because he talks about the economy and the border most of the time, he probably doesn’t care about abortion,” Murphy said.
That trade-off was especially brutal for Harris among White women without a college education. Those women are a huge voting bloc and always critical to the outcome in the three Rust Belt states that once again functioned as the tipping point of this election: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Democrats had hoped Harris might improve over Biden’s 2020 performance with those blue-collar White women after the party’s gubernatorial candidates had all run relatively strongly with them in 2022, the first election following the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe. But Trump either matched or exceeded his 2020 margins among those women in all three states, both the exit polls and VoteCast found. A key reason: Trump routed Harris by about 2-to-1 among the White women without a college degree who supported legal abortion but were negative on the economy, according to figures provided by the CNN polling unit. Trump even won nearly half of college-educated White women, a much more Democratic-leaning bloc, who supported legal abortion but viewed the economy negatively, the exit polls found.
Fernandez Ancona said their group’s polling around the election showed that discontent over the economy and the border outweighed other doubts voters held about Trump – but did not erase them. “I do not read the data as showing a fundamental realignment among the traditionally Democratic coalition,” she argued. “It’s a very reluctant kind of support that they’re giving to Trump because they are tired of the status quo. Harris was primarily advocating for a return to the status quo. And they were saying, ‘I had to put my concerns about him aside because the economy has been so bad under Democrats.’”
Murphy, though, said it is a mistake for Democrats to think of the conflicted Trump voters as “ambivalent” or choosing him only as the lesser of two evils in their minds. Despite their doubts about Trump, she said, they were affirmatively voting for him because they had become convinced he would provide more financial stability for their families.
But, Murphy argues, holding those conflicted voters won’t be easy for Trump once he enters office and starts implementing the full sweep of his agenda. Once in office, she said, “I think his numbers crater for two reasons.” One, she said, “is because the things he will try to do are on their face unpopular.” The other risk he faces, she said, is that if Trump becomes entangled in political firefights over pardoning January 6, 2021, rioters, or ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, or allowing his appointees to undermine childhood vaccines, it will violate those voters’ expectations that he would prioritize their economic well-being.
“The trade that many of these voters felt they were making was in some ways rooted in the idea that he wasn’t going to do [these things] or it wasn’t going to be a priority,” Murphy said. “When that’s what you are doing, you are telling voters about the economy not being a priority… and [that] gives Democrats a huge opportunity to lift up that he’s not someone you can trust to lead in your interests.”
Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, agreed that if Trump overreads his mandate, he could quickly strain his support among the voters ambivalent about him-including not only the racial minorities he drew into his coalition but white-collar Republicans who reluctantly backed him because they viewed Biden and Harris as too liberal.
If Trump provides his most controversial nominees – such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Kash Patel as director of the FBI – a “blank check” to pursue polarizing agendas, Ayres said, “we are going to be looking at Joe Biden level-job approval numbers before we turn around” for Trump.
What feelings about Trump could mean for Republicans
Trump, if he follows the constitutional limit on presidential terms, won’t appear on a ballot again himself. But his standing will affect the GOP’s position in the 2026 midterm elections and the race to succeed him in 2028 – just as Biden’s weakened position created an enormous, and likely insurmountable, headwind for Harris this year.
Issues that were overshadowed by the economy in the 2024 election could still weaken Trump, and by extension other Republicans. Ayres, for instance, says Trump and the GOP will be hurt if Kennedy is confirmed and his anti-vaccination rhetoric contributes to future outbreaks of childhood diseases like measles. And any move by Trump’s administration to restrict access to abortion – for instance, by rolling back Biden’s moves to ease access to medication abortion – could alienate voters who believed him when he said he believed the issue should now be left to the states. Polls leave little doubt that most voters are dubious of widespread pardons for the January 6 rioters – something Trump has pledged to pursue within his first hours of a second term.
But the dynamics of Trump’s victory last month illuminate that issues more central to voters’ daily lives remain most likely to function as the pivot point of the next four years. Both McLaughlin, the Trump pollster, and Murphy, the Harris pollster, point to the same straightforward central explanation for why voters returned him to the White House. “Voters didn’t like the direction of the country and they thought he could make their lives better,” McLaughlin said. Echoed Murphy: “For voters, he was just the guy from the other party when they were unhappy.”
If voters feel that their lives are improving over the next four years, the example of 2024 suggests they will suppress their other concerns about Trump and continue to support him, a trend that would benefit GOP candidates in 2026 and 2028. “He knows that if he is successful everything else will take care of itself,” said McLaughlin. “He knows his legacy is all contingent on having a strong economy.”
But if Trump doesn’t reward the faith of these conflicted voters by making progress on the issues that most concern them, they may inexorably turn their focus back toward their other hesitations about him, a trend that would hurt GOP candidates in the coming elections. “Performance matters,” said Ayres. “Performance drives job approval and job approval drives votes. It’s not more complicated than that.”
